


in stasis

by ilgaksu



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: AI Lance, Ableism, Alternate Universe - Artificial Intelligence, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anxiety, Artificial Intelligence, Bisexual Lance (Voltron), Cuban Lance (Voltron), Disability, Gay Keith (Voltron), Injury Recovery, Internalised ableism, Korean Keith (Voltron), M/M, Major Character Injury, Permanent Injury, Physical Disability, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-13
Updated: 2017-01-25
Packaged: 2018-09-17 02:59:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9301076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: The story starts like this: with a story where you think you know the end, until it turns out you don’t, until it turns out you didn’t have a clue.In which for three months of Lance McClain's life, he lives as an AI, waiting for his prosthetics to come online. It goes about as well as expected.





	1. Earth time: August

_Art by the amazing[marz](https://marzdraws.tumblr.com), link to reblog/show love [here](https://marzdraws.tumblr.com/post/156393753833/numbers-and-space-dust-%EF%BE%9F-was-trying-to-work-on)._

 

*

“Sweetling,” Nyma says, sidling up to where Frey is watching the Red Paladin with all six of her hungry golden eyes, “Don’t bother.”

Frey hisses under her breath when she exhales, steam flirting between her teeth. The party - to celebrate the liberation of one of the smaller moons in the system - swirls around them like a planet’s revolve but for the bar. In the low light, the red of his armour glistens, something glossy despite the lacklustre dents and the separate black holes of his eyes. Nyma’s met boys like that before. She’s met him before, but his type isn’t too hard to find. Take a step outside of any space station in the Empire, there’s boys like him, their armour caved in like a mimicry of their chests, lookers in the sort of way desperate things can be.

“Go on then,” Frey murmurs, “I’ll bite. What’s his damage?”

“Remember the Blue Paladin?” Nyma asks. She spills part of her drink and licks it off her wrist absently, watching Frey’s expression change out of the corner of her eyes. Remember the Blue Paladin, she’s asking someone else, like she didn’t ask herself that when the news came through on the black market: watching Frey like Rolo had watched her all the next day.

“I thought that was just a rumour,” Frey mutters, after a moment of silence.

“Yeah, well,” Nyma says. In her memory, the Blue Paladin is a boy called Lance who smiles at her like the sun’s trapped under his skin, eyes fawn-hesitant; in her memory, the Blue Paladin will be eighteen forever, crystallised in perfect stasis. “You thought wrong.”

 

*

The story starts like this: it’s an everyday battle, and it ends with Lance halfway to dead in the pilot seat. Keith isn’t sure how much of this part he remembers, and how much he read in the diagnostics later. He knows that the brain forgets periods of great stress, it’s the best shot it can give at healing, so it’s all piecemeal in his thoughts. Whatever it is for him, he knows it must be incomparable for Lance, Blue’s metal plating buckled in around him, cutting him apart. He thinks Lance must have passed out during it, because he’s unconscious when they find him crashed on the planet surface. He thinks the fractured bone of Lance’s forearm means he must have thrown his arm up to shield his eyes from the fast-approaching ground, leaving his ribs and lower body vulnerable. It takes them twelve Earth hours to get him out of there, and Keith stands in the shower afterwards and doesn’t think of much at all. He keeps his mind still, locked onto the fall of water and his own exhaustion, and waits for news.

Five days later, Lance appears on the comms panel, a full-body hologram in his clothes and with his face, saying, “Hey, guys!”

The devil’s in the detail: he’s even got the doodles on his arms from screwing around with a half-empty biro during strategy meetings, unwinding paths of starlight and blocky lettering like barbed wire around his wrist. _Ask Coran about tech manual!!!_ Keith knows they’re there because when they’d set the bone there had still been some of the ink visible.

The story starts like this: with a story where you think you know the end, until it turns out you don’t, until it turns out you didn’t have a clue.

 

*

Pidge reacts the fastest of any of them; Keith can’t decide if he wants to burst into hysterical tears, hug Lance, or punch him in the stomach. Pidge does everyone a favour and tries to do all three at once.

“So,” Allura asks some time later, brushing her hair behind the knifetop of her ear, “Does anyone have any suggestions for a plan?”

She barely waits to scan their expressions before sighing, her shoulders bowing under it and letting her hands fall into her lap. She glances down briefly, twisting them together, the clear polish of her nails flashing. Keith had always associated the act of wringing your hands with pastel-coated paperbacks and the afternoon movies his third foster mother liked. Not for the first time, he wonders how old Allura was when her father threw her into cryo; not for the first time, he wonders why he can’t pluck up the courage to just ask her. Allura gives a little helpless half-shrug.

“Yeah,” she sighs, “Well, me neither. I’m all out of ideas. The Galra might sense an advantage they can press if we go quiet, and Lance is in no state to be flying anywhere anytime soon.”

“Can’t I decide that for myself?” Lance asks, and they all turn to him. He’s gripping onto his own ankle like an anchor - given other holograms are the only thing he can reliably touch, Pidge realised, Keith isn’t surprised that his fingers are clenched tight enough they’d grind bone on anyone else. He’s pressing his lips together until they whiten, eyes blaring. “Just saying, guys. Can’t I?”

“Lance,” Shiro begins gently. “Have you - do you remember much of what happened?”

Trust Shiro to fall on the nicest way of asking _._ Trust Shiro to fall on it and then take it on himself to do the asking. Lance rolls his eyes.

“I mean,” Lance says, looking to the side, “I was there. And for the last few hours, I’ve been hooked into the mainstream. Or maybe days? I dunno. I just woke up and knew how to appear on these things, and you said it’s been five days, so who knows how long I’ve been floating around? I know how the ship works, it’s all just - it’s coding, but it’s - hard to explain - you’ve put me in that antechamber thing, right? It’s an operation room. Did you guys know that? I’m guessing Coran knew that.”  

He taps his fingertips against his ankle. It’s one of Lance’s tells. Keith can’t help but be transfixed by it. There’s an awkward silence, then Lance ducks his head and says, “Look, Shiro, you don’t have to - talk around it. I have a read on my vitals, so I know I’m alive. I know my legs aren’t there. I know there’s something helping me breathe. I know, ‘cause there’s no way Blue would have catapulted me into some kind of Matrix set up unless it was that or game over.”

There’s a silence after that.

“You seem very calm about that,” Shiro murmurs. Lance flexes his fingers against his ankle and says, “What are you gonna do?”

There’s a silence after that, too.

“If you ask me, I think we tell them the Blue Paladin is dead,” Coran says, “No hard feelings, Lance, you understand.”

“Uh huh,” Lance replies, after a shocked pause. “Who taught him to say that? The feelings thing? Come on, ‘fess up.”

“It was you, I believe,” Coran reminds him. “When we were comrades-in-arms, cleaning the healing pods and -”

Lance coughs.

“Oh, right. Yeah. My bad, guys.”

“As you were saying....” Allura steers them back. Coran’s face brightens again. “I can’t help but see your point here, Coran, although it’s a little callous.”

“A little! I’m right here!” Lance insists.

“That’s exactly Coran’s point,” Allura says, and catches Shiro’s eye, who straightens in his seat and goes, “Yes. I see. That’s actually - quite an admirable solution, Coran.” Allura frowns, bringing her thumb to her mouth as though to bite on the nail, before catching herself and retreating. “Everybody on the planet surface will be aware of the Blue Lion crashed by now, naturally. We were not discreet in the rescue attempt.”

“Was it a big deal then?” Lance wants to know.

“It was kind of a big deal, yes.”

“We landed the castle in order to activate a shield around you,” Allura explains to him, then gestures to Hunk and Keith. “After Hunk shattered the windshield, Keith cut away the majority of the surrounding - the cockpit had buckled around you on impact.”

“You hacked up Blue?” Lance immediately demands. “Is she okay? Can I see her? Where is she? Where did you put her?” He turns on Shiro, halfway to standing, the sound of the static rising like panic. “I want to see her!”

“A thank you would be nice,” Keith snaps, and Lance turns on him, teeth bared. It’s easy to relay this Lance over his memory, reinstate him in his brain like a recovered save file, when his previous incarnation had been too quiet; draining out under Keith’s hands, time unspooling through his fingers and his blade, running over to the floor.

“Keith, sit down. Lance, calm down. She’s fine,” Shiro orders and soothes in equal measure. “She wasn’t at her best, but we’ve been fixing her up -”

“I want to see her!”

Lance stamps his foot. Near to them, a holo-device, idling on standby, blows out.

“Did you -” Pidge says into the sudden quiet, “Did you do that?”

They all look at Lance and he winces.

“I don’t know!” he insists, defensively, backing away, hands held out. “I don’t - maybe? I was just -” He looks to Allura wildly, his face rippling, voice growing fainter. “Is this a paladin thing, maybe? The mind connection thing, just, I don’t know, the next level? Haha, I can’t believe I levelled up faster than you lot and all it took was a little fall from the sky -”

“Lance,” Allura tells him hurriedly, leaping over the chair to grab another data-pad, “Lance, you’re losing connection, you need to calm down -”

“I am calm! I’m so calm! I’m the most calm!”

Behind Lance, the data streams are flashing red to green and back to red, speeding up as though synced to Lance’s invisible heartbeat. Keith can tell because the lights are visible through Lance’s projection, and quickly turns to Hunk, who’s rapidly paling. Keith remembers that Hunk doesn’t like ghost stories.  

“Oh my god,” Pidge mutters, “Lance, Blue didn’t just upload you _into_ the Castle. She made you _part_ of the Castle.”

“Stabilise him,” Allura instructs Coran, throwing the datapad to him in a clean arc. “I can’t do it fast enough. Find him using - using - maybe quintessence -”

“Will people stop using that word? I don’t know what it means!”

“Lock onto him. Triangulate with the Lions’ tracking signals - Blue’s is operative at normal functionality - Coran, _keep him here._ ”

 _Delayed reaction,_ they call it, Keith thinks faintly, watching Lance glitch in and out of existence like a candle guttering, his eyes the only stable thing and too bright, all iris without pupil. It’s a trauma thing. That’s what they’d called it when he’d walked out of the Garrison and into the desert, leftovers of his heart on his sleeves and their shadow at his back. _Delayed reaction._

“Can somebody start saying words I can understand in, like, the next thirty seconds or -”

“Activate executive order BHN9, security measure 459, authorisation code Kerberos.” Lance freezes on the spot, his eyes tracking Pidge and the simulated rise and fall of his chest slowing. They push their glasses back up their nose, ignore the others’ eyes and continue: “Identify your origin strand.”

“ _Unknown,_ ” Lance immediately responds, voice flat and tinny, before blinking and shaking his head. “Wait, Pidge. What are you doing, buddy?”

“It’ll be fine, Lance. I’m trying to find you,” Pidge reassures him, before saying to Coran. “Any luck?”

“Working on it.”

Pidge nods and turns back to Lance.

“That code should only work to calm active Castle AIs experiencing disruption due to signal error, poor crystal alignment or distress.” Their voice is calm in the way water is no less destructive for being calm, in the way a still pool can fill up your lungs. Lance bites his lip.

“Right,” he murmurs quietly. “So then - right. Okay. You know, I hate it when you’re right, Pidge.”

“You know,” Pidge replies, “This time, so do I,” and he smiles at them, a tiny lapse of a smile.

“First time for everything, Holtmeister.”

“Fuck,” Keith says unwillingly. “So he’s -”

“The Castle is quasi-spiritual energy. I imagine if you were trying to save your dying paladin, you’d go onto autopilot, instinct. You’d want to send him somewhere safe.”

None of them say it, but Keith reckons they must all be thinking it: _Blue was trying to send him home._

“If you’re part of the Castle’s operating system, which, you know -”

“Yeah,” Lance says, mouth twisting. “I know. Keep going.”

“You must have an origin strand. The first part of your input code. It’s how we’d recall you if you go on the blitz, but without it, I can’t find your establishing data. The origin strand is your anchoring point. Allura, Coran, can you activate any longstanding executive orders for AIs?”

They all look to Lance for permission. He folds his arms and shrugs. Keith remembers that people fold their arms to cover their chests, to cover their weak spots: it’s basic psychology.

“Go ahead.” They all visibly hesitate, and Lance beckons them forward with one hand. “I told you. Go ahead. Hit me with your best shot.” He smiles again, and it’s halfway back to how it should be. “Catch me if you can, Pidgenator.”  

Pidge smiles briefly in return, and then gestures to Allura, who steps forward.

“This is Princess Allura, reiterating executive order BHN9. Activating security measure 909. You have no current established origin strand. Do you know your upload date?”

Lance’s eyes flare, emitting their own light.

“ _Five days, eleven hours and sixteen minutes ago,_ ” he tells her, expression blank.

“Are you aware of the circumstances of your upload?”

“ _Emergency protocol to ensure preservation of life. Vitals were punctured. Loss of life imminent if not already in process._ ”  

“Thank you. Do you remember any data points?”

“ _Chamber 60A._ ”

Keith and Shiro exchange a loaded glance. _Lance’s room._

“When was this?”

“ _Three days, two hours and forty minutes ago._ ”

“I see. Do you have a main directive?”

“Overruled,” Shiro says, from by the door. “You are not required to answer the question.” He looks at them all, trying for light, voice at odds with the stone of his face when he says, “Ask Lance that in his own time. I don’t feel comfortable taking that, and this is - this feels like taking. That’s not -”

He seems at loss for words, hand loosely circling the wrist of his prosthetic.

“Agreed,” Keith says hastily.

“Seconded,” Hunk adds, frowning at where Lance stands without reacting. “Can he - can he hear us right now?”

“Sure I can,” Lance says, voice rendered almost unrecognisable by the lack of affect, “I’d recognise you anywhere, pal, you know that.”

Hunk’s smile is a bit watery. Keith itches to leave for the training bay, until he finds himself wondering how he’ll fight the bots now when they glow like Lance’s eyes; if he can strike them down without finding himself back in Blue’s cockpit, slipping, bayard cleaving through metal, Lance soundless.

“Are you certain that complete transfer was successful?” Allura continues, bring them back on topic. “Are you aware of any interference? Is your data corrupted, Lance?” She closes her eyes. “I’m sorry for asking. I have to check. The Galra have infiltrated before. I can’t compromise the safety of -”

“ _I am incorruptible_ ,” Lance replies, his voice still flatlining, his eyes glowing faintly: unblinking, untethered, a boy lost in space. Keith notices his feet don’t quite touch the ground. “ _I am a Paladin of Voltron_.”

 

*

They make their way back to making a plan eventually. Lance’s origin strand remains undiscovered, but they have no choice. The first tentative reactions to the news of the crash come buoying back to them, borne on a wave of coded messages, requests for information, _is all hope yet lost?_ A thousand planets hanging in the balance, in the cradle of Zarkon’s empire, waiting to hear if the hope of dawn remained just that: insubstantial as light.

“It’s in Galra territory, too!” Coran helpfully mentions, as though Galra territory is something to be pinpointed and not canvassed. “You can bet your bottom dollar that Zarkon’s heard by now! Whatever a dollar is.”

“Was that one also you?” Hunk asks Lance. “They can’t all be from you, right?”

“Hunk, how could you underestimate me like that?”

“The Urasians have offered a delegation to settle any debt,” Allura mentions, “They hope the ill news they hear will not sour our relations. They’ve offered you what discreet burial honours they can.”

“How nice of them,” Keith spits, “They probably think the phosphorus killed him. If not for their atmosphere in the first place -”

“Nobody’s expecting us to kill Lance ourselves,” Coran adds brightly. “It’s really perfect!”

“Except for how we’re not doing that,” Hunk says, very slowly. “We’re very much not killing Lance.”

“You say the sweetest things, Hunk.” Lance is smiling when he leans forward, forearms braced on his knees.

They’re still not sure how this works, only that Lance can only interact with the environment when it’s not another living thing, and only when in direct relation to a holo-device. He can’t open doors or pick up his bayard or manipulate weight, but he can make it look like he’s sitting on furniture, providing the holo-devices are in place. Between them all, they’ve dragged every last one out of the castle depths and scattered them around all of the main areas, including outside and inside the operation chamber where Lance’s body lies, although Lance has avoided there like it’s entry to a plague city. Pidge is torn between the Lance they can talk to about the inner workings of the Castle’s mechanisms and the Lance with half the architecture of his body needing serious reconstruction: his legs rebuilt from scratch, his lungs reinforced with synthetic tissue to the point of nearly being entirely replaced, the titanium bone to plate over the snapped wing of his collarbone, his arm fracture, his seven broken ribs.

 

(“You are, as the poets say, a right mess,” Keith had heard Pidge say to Lance the day before. “But hey, you wanna see the sweet new upgrade I’ve cooked up?”

“Nah,” Lance had said, worrying at his lip. “Nah, it’s - it’s fine. Just don’t make me look like Robocop.”

“Oh my god, I won’t make you look like Robocop, give me some credit and yourself a better viewing history.”)

 

Keith is torn between the Lance who keeps laughing and the Lance who wasn’t, so Keith’ll remember this part later, because Lance is still smiling when he says, “Go for it. Tell them I’m dead. Tell them all I’m dead.”

Behind Keith’s eyes and in his head, there’s this _silence_ ; the moment after they saw Lance fall out of the sky, realising Lance had switched off his comms link with forty seconds until impact so they couldn’t hear him. There’s this silence, and the nebulous yet inescapable knowledge that somewhere on the surface, dust was rising. It was supposed to be a routine mission. It had become routine. Now, Lance is smiling and saying, “Tell them I’m dead,” and everyone else is nodding. The part of Keith that will never shut off from being a strategist, the part of him that thinks _diversions are how I got Shiro back_ and ignores how much of it was by accident, is saying _it’ll force the Galra to show their hand early - they’ll think we’re weakened, and try and come after us all - we’ll be able to cut them out of playing a long game, because we’re not running to their schedule, and all it’ll take is for the universe to believe the Blue Paladin stopped breathing in all that dust_ -

“I don’t like it,” Keith finds himself saying.

“Good job it’s not your call then,” Lance says nastily, “‘Cause guess what, I’m even more sure I’m doing it now. Thanks, Keith.”

“Lance, you’re being petty,” Hunk murmurs.

“Of course I am,” Lance mutters back, “And anyway, it’s not like I can’t pilot Blue remotely, if it comes down to it. As long as I’m within Castle signal. It’s like hotwiring. I’ve always wanted to try hotwiring.”

“Lance,” Hunk reminds him, “You can’t drive.”

“Not the point! And - I mean - I said it would be cool, didn’t I?” Lance says, eyes distant. “Once. You guys remember? You don’t remember? Well, you know. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.”

“You’re sure?” Shiro checks. Lance stares directly at Keith.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Keith mumbles, heating. “It’s your funeral.”

“That’s nice,” Lance replies steadily. “It’s been a while since we agreed on something.”

 

*

It turns out Lance makes a pretty good castle guardian, if by ‘pretty good’, you mean ‘dedicated’, and by ‘dedicated’, you mean ‘in his ongoing mission to ruin Keith’s day, week, and entire life through both concerted and unconscious effort’.

“I think maybe you’re overreacting to this,” Hunk tells Keith, raising his voice slightly over the sound of _Eye of the Tiger_ blasting through the comms link for the seventh time this last hour.

“No,” Keith says, “No, I really don’t think I am.”  He raises his voice again, to shout directly into the link. “Lance, I swear on everything I fucking own -”

“So, what, like - your belt? Your knife? What?”

“Lance -”

“Oh my god, don’t say it. Your bandana. You’re swearing on your stylish face cloth, I’m so - you sure go big or go home, Kogane.”

“Lance, quit it,” Shiro cuts in. “We talked about this. Low hanging fruit.”

“But it’s so easy,” Lance whines, and Keith grits his teeth. “Aren’t you all supposed to be nice to me? It’s been a week. I thought near-death privileges were supposed to last longer, you know?” He drops into a bad but recognisable mimicry of Shiro’s voice during briefings. “ _Be nice to Lance, be careful with Lance, try not to step on Lance’s feelings, he’s going through a lot and we have to respect that -_ ”

“It’d be much easier to step on your feelings if you’d stay down afterwards,” Keith mutters, at the same time Shiro says, “Trust me, Lance, you’re keeping us all updated on your wellbeing just fine.”

“I’d like to dedicate this next song to our one and only in the Red Paladin’s seat,” Lance croons into the comms link, and promptly puts Eye of the Tiger on for the eighth time. From the beginning. Keith sinks a little lower in his seat.  

Red hums in the back of his head, smug and insistent.

“Shut up,” he tells her, and when she doesn’t, he turns the music up.

 

*

Lance is sat, cross-legged, on Blue’s nose, signal stretching out from her windshield like an old-school cinema projector. His palms are flat in front of him. It takes Keith a moment to realise that he’s patting her. The way he’s bracing his weight on his other hand is probably just habit.

“Hey, girl,” he says. It’s supposed to be quiet, but the holding room has always had ridiculous acoustics. The faintly tinny quality to his voice - the consonants serrated by metallic and the vowels too crisp - doesn’t help either. Keith can tell by now when Lance is trying to be soft, though. Proximity does that to you. Enclosed environments. Keith should probably leave. “Hey, it’s okay. It’s okay. I don’t blame you, yeah? You gotta do what you gotta do.”

It looks like something out of a painting, Lance with his head bowed, Lance half-translucent and trying at being hushed, his voice sliding over the words unreal like a litany will gain them substance: _it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay._ They shiver off the walls. Ricochet, Keith thinks. It’s the thing the movies always forget and cop dramas always remember: ricochets are what you’ve got to look out for. Ricochets tell you everything. Lance’s bayard is long-range so there’s no doubt he knows that. Keith’s seen him use it to their advantage before. Right now, it seems less like mathematics, or strategy, or something Keith can parse later in a debriefing. There’s nothing that Keith can pinpoint and trace back: this is what caused the feeling, and this is why. In textbooks on great wars, they call it _no singular trigger._ Meanwhile, Lance has rolled onto his back, staring at the reinforced silver of the ceiling. The castle is beautiful, but right now it’s inescapably metal, and Lance watches it bearing down with one hand absently stroking along Blue’s nose.

He’s never seen Lance so still before. Must be the projection. Must be a trick of the light.

“Don’t be like that,” Lance huffs. “I’m still here, right?”

Keith breaks out of it, heads down to the training bay; tells himself he wasn’t holding his breath, tells himself Lance was talking to Blue. That’s it. That’s all. Proximity; ricochet; no singular trigger.

He tries not to think this word: _ill-equipped._

 

*

And so the tributes start arriving, in slivers of code from across space. Allura arranges a diplomatic meeting with the Urasians, and somewhere on their planet’s surface, priestesses sing for a boy perched on the comms panel watching Keith eat with eyes like a wolf’s. Keith tries to keep chewing, but after a while he swallows and puts down his spoon.

“Something you want?”

“Yeah, actually.” Lance crosses one leg over the other. “You know that feeling when you’ve been starving and then you get to eat?”

“Uh huh,” Keith replies, wondering where he’s going with this. Today, Lance has three piercings in his right ear, the rings a progression of darkening alloys. Apparently, AI visual modification comes as a blessing to a boy terrified of needles and permanent decisions. Try before you buy. Half the universe is sending discreet enquiries to replace him, and Lance still won’t replace the clothes he’s wearing with a different set. He’s still in the striped green shirt and dark jeans he’d worn the day the distress call came through, biting at the string of his hoodie, which was purple and ridiculous and still somewhere in Lance’s room, presumably, the smell of him fading out of the cotton. Keith remembers that Lance had let the string fall out of his mouth, startled at the blare of the alarm, and that they’d raced each other to get to the lions first.

“That,” Lance is saying, “I miss that.” He sighs and tips his head back towards the ceiling. “I don’t get hungry now.”

“It’s overrated,” Keith tells him. Lance angles his face directly under the bright light emanating from the screens, his smile a jagged thing with the way the light splits his face.

“I think I’m going to forget what that feels like,” Lance says, and as though that wasn’t deeply horrifying, “Mmmm, halogens. It’s almost like the sun, except for how it’s not.” He flops onto his back. “I want to go planetside.”

“We have a sun nearby,” Keith points out. They do, technically: they’re in orbit of a Red Dwarf.

“It’s a dying sun, Keith,” Lance retorts, “Like my social life. Don’t worry, I know you don't understand. Yours died years ago.”

“Says the dead man walking.”

“You wound me,” Lance says, “You kick me whilst I’m down. I’m not even technically walking, you dick. Go have a look for yourself.”

“I’ve seen,” Keith tells him dryly, “I helped put you there.” He blinks away a memory of rust-coloured water draining out of the shower to find Lance looking at him, half-smiling, eyes serious.

“You keep having to do that, apparently,” Lance says.

“I mean,” Keith surprises himself by saying, “It’s not my fault you keep falling for me,” and Lance barks out a sudden laugh.

“Swooning,” he corrects, “You really should’ve said swooning.”

“I thought you said you didn’t remember.”

Lance draws one knee up and wraps his fingers around his ankle, rests his face against his knee. His eyes are very direct.

“Come on, Keith,” he says softly, “I say a lot of stupid shit,” and there’s a slow, unbearable moment where they avoid looking at each other then. It’s broken by the faint chime of an incoming missive. Lance leans back and swipes it as acknowledged.

“You’re not gonna check it?”

“I checked them all at first,” Lance admits, “You know, like, that very specific fantasy of getting to witness your own funeral? That kind of thing?”

“Not really,” Keith says. He’s been to two funerals in his life and neither had been what people expected them to be based on opening title sequences at the cinema: mostly he’d just stood there in a cheap black suit and felt hollow. Lance raises his eyebrows.

“No? Okay, cool,” Lance says, “It’s a thing, I guess. That people do. I just - you want to know what people would say, right? I’m finding out what people would say.” He sighs again and slides off the panel to the floor, his hand disappearing through the panel and reappearing on the other side when he pulls it forward. Lance doesn’t like it when that happens, but he likes the others acknowledging it even less, so Keith doesn’t comment. “It got too weird.”

“Too weird?”

“None of the people talking about me know me,” Lance explains, “And the people back home who know me have no clue.” For a moment, he looks abruptly, abjectly miserable. “I think they might think I’m dead, too. You know. I disappeared.”

“No, you haven’t. You’re still here.”

Lance gives him a wan smile.

“Sure.”

“Hey, no, you totally are.” Keith stands up and follows Lance as he wanders listlessly around the room. “It’d be lot less annoying if you weren’t here, I’d be able to tell. And. And I know you.”

Lance laughs, looking at him sidelong.

“You’re bad at this.”

“I know.”

“Like really, really bad at -- did you just say _I know_?”

“Yes?”

“Holy fuck,” Lance crows, dropping down onto a chair. “Keith Kogane just admitted to being made of the same decaying, organic matter as the rest of us. Holy fuck. Pinch me, Keith.” He holds out an arm imperiously. Keith ignores it. It's probably rhetorical. More importantly -

“I admit when I’m bad at stuff!”

“When? Did I miss it? Was I asleep?” Lance mocks, lips curving upwards. “Oh, no, wait, it must have been - did you just recite it all when I was in cyberland? For, like, the whole five days? Did you remember to take a breath every now and again, Keith, ‘cause breathing’s important to organic --”

“I don’t think you’re one to go around calling people out right now, Lance,” Keith says primly. “You’re about as organic as an electrical storm right now.”

“That’s still -”

“Or, you know, a plastic bag.”

Lance’s jaw drops. Keith wonders if he’s gone too far; story of his life. He opens his mouth to backtrack, when Lance starts laughing so hard he’s intermittently glitching.

“Oh my god,” Keith tries to tell him, panicking as the holo-devices start to record a sudden upsurge, “Don’t glitch out, if you do Pidge’ll freak and -”

“I’m not gonna - I’m not - _your face -_ ”

Keith rolls his eyes, trying to swallow the laughter roiling in his own chest. It’s contagious. Lance is contagious. He gives in.

“See,” Lance says, “This is what bonding looks like,” and Keith’s next breath catches in his throat. When he looks at Lance, Lance winks. It’s obnoxious. Keith’s own heartrate kicks up, flickering in his chest like a house catching fire, going to his head like the first breath of oxygen in the airlock. “I look prettier this time, too.”

“You’re fine, I guess.”

Lance squawks.

“I think you mean super fine!”

“I guess.”

Keith lets the moment stretch out too long before realising that’s what he’s doing, and hastily says, “I’ve gotta go - to the -”

“Training bay, huh,” Lance finishes for him. When Keith looks at him, Lance is raising his eyebrows. Keith feels the flush radiate out of him, and mutters, “Well, yeah. Zarkon’s gonna be - he’ll have heard and -”

Keith has managed to make it halfway to the door by now, though he doesn’t remember taking the steps away. His back is half-turned when Lance goes, so quietly it could be denied, “Thanks. For getting me out of there. You know. Twice. I owe you.”

“That’s not how this works,” Keith says, or tries to say, talking around the taste of his heart in his mouth, and bolts to the training bay.  

The thought Lance thinks that in any world Keith wouldn’t go back for him, that Keith doing it was some conscious act of kindness, is like breaking every bone in his body. The thought that Lance knows Keith would go back for him is what he imagines it was like, forty seconds until impact; knowing he’s going to break every bone in his body and helpless to stop the inexorable roll of gravity. The thought that both are equally true statements keeps Keith moving all night, falling back into his body and out of his own head. Lance had switched the comms link off so they couldn’t hear him. It’s harder to switch off yourself. The human body doesn’t possess a killswitch.  

Around three in the morning, Keith drags himself back to his bed, and it’s quiet right until eight-forty-five, when Lance appears next to him in the corridor; no warning, mid-sentence. He’s chirping excitedly about Allura giving him control of the antechamber her father used to use.

“I can’t get into my old room without a handprint,” Lance is chattering away and Keith yawns against his own hand and says, “I thought you were there before. You said so. Couldn’t you just manually override the restriction?”

Lance goes so quiet that Keith stops to look at him.

“I could,” he admits. Nearby, the light fittings hiss, reacting to a rise in Lance's emotions like the sea in response to the moon. An ongoing conversation of vitals spikes and synapses between Lance and the Castle, connecting them. Environmental feedback.“It’s just -”

“You don’t want to?” Keith can’t imagine not wanting his own space. He’s spent his whole life clawing it out, has heard Lance’s oft-repeated sagas of petty squabbles with his brothers until his sister moved out to Havana and Lance got her room. Now, Lance shrugs and goes, “It’s all still like it was. Nobody’s been in there. Allura told me that, when she was explaining the override. She literally said _it’ll all be exactly like it was.”_

Keith hums under his breath. He can’t see the problem until Lance smiles down at his own feet and says, “It’s all the same. But I’m -- it’ll be - I won’t even be able to pick up my dirty laundry, c’mon. I can’t pretend nothing’s changed. At least with Alfor’s old pad, I can touch things.” Out of habit, he tries to nudge Keith with his shoulder; it passes through. “Put up some fairy lights, you won’t be able to tell the difference, I swear.”

“Are you inviting me over?”

“Well, yeah? If you wanna?” Lance’s steps pick up speed. “The others, too. I don’t want to just sit in there all day.”

 _I don’t want to be alone_. Keith says, “Sure,” and watches Lance’s face light up. The brightness of it resounds against the sudden hollow of Keith’s chest.

“Nice!” Lance does a tiny victory dance, swings into Keith’s lane and starts walking backwards. “Come over later!”

He walks backwards until he passes right through Shiro, waiting for them at the end of the corridor, who jerks out of his folded-arms stance and says, “Lance, please. This isn’t Ghostbusters.”

“Original or remake?” Pidge wants to know, leaning out from their open doorway, and looks quietly pleased when Shiro shrugs, throws Keith a confused glance and says, “I only ever saw the remake, so -”

When Lance puts on the Ghostbusters theme in every imaginable remix for their morning training, Keith bravely restricts himself to telling Shiro it’s his fault every other minute. He thinks he hears Shiro mutter something like _you sure know how to pick ‘em, Keith,_ on their way back into the Castle, but decides against asking in Lance’s earshot.

“Don’t,” Hunk sounds weary, watching Lance run repeatedly into the Castle’s activated barrier, laughing as he passes seamlessly through. “They deserve each other.”

Lance spins mid-air and hits the ground in a tangle of limbs and static; Pidge steps over him, engrossed in their data-pad readings; Keith says, “I’m gonna go -”

“Training bay?” Pidge interrupts. “Right? I’m right, aren’t I?” They turn to Hunk. The two of them seem to be rapidly forming a concrete alliance, because Hunk goes, “He’s doing the face. Definitely the training bay.”

Shiro, the dirty traitor, nods.

Out of spite, but with limited options, Keith goes, “Lance? Can we hang out now?” and hopes he keeps the nerves out of the syllables. It's almost worth it for the rest of the team's faces, still worth it when Lance bounds to his feet and runs over like the artificial intelligence equivalent of a golden retriever - yet somehow significantly less worth it when Lance goes, “Eager. I like it. Come this way.”

  
He does _finger guns_. Keith follows him and doesn’t dare look back.

 

 


	2. Earth time: August to September

  


The desert at night is silent. The sand stretches out under the moon like a reverse ocean, the skyline brutal and darkening to a bruise. Plum, the colour ringed below Shiro’s eyes some mornings; the colour of Lance’s hoodie, the blur of his shoulders out of the corner of Keith’s eye as they had run, as Lance yanked it over his head still zipped and threw it through the open doorway to his room as they passed, the material fluttering to the ground like a surrender. The colour of red layered on blue metal.

Despite all this, Keith can admit it’s beautiful, easily and without reservation, with pride even. After all, it was his home for half a year. He can see his house behind them and to the right, all distance, the faint scarlet of his hoverbike; the homecoming of it familiar as anchor.

He turns to Lance, sat next to him on the rock outcropping, looking for all the sunlessness like he’s basking. Lance catches the end of Keith’s gaze and grins lazily, smugly. It hooks something in Keith. Lance says, “How’s it measure up?”

“The desert isn’t silent at night,” Keith informs him. Lance scowls and throws his back against the ground with a very solid-sounding thump. Keith nearly says _mind your head_ , but then remembers and bites his tongue.

“Oh, man,” he grouses. “I should’ve known. You’re one of those people who says their flaw in job interviews is that they’re a perfectionist and actually _means_ it, aren’t you? Ugh.”

“But I am a perfectionist,” Keith says, smirking. “I said so when they asked me at the Garrison.”

“And I say: ugh,” Lance repeats, “Once more, with feeling.”

“Also, I know the desert is freezing at night, but is that really the part you kept realism for?”

Lance looks surprised. Keith, holding down a shiver, realises Lance must not have noticed, because he frowns, clearly unsettled, and goes, “If you want something else -”

Before Keith can reply, Lance starts gesturing, like swiping across a comms pad, and the room turns.  Keith blinks because he has to - the array of worlds and colours dizzying, like watching a kaleidoscope sped up past its breaking point - but Lance’s eyes don’t even flicker, eerily blank, back to glowing like a cat’s.

“You might want to close your eyes,” Lance says, still unblinking, his gaze unbearably blue. “Apparently it makes people dizzy? You know, like, carsick?”

“I don’t get carsick.”

“If you throw up, you’re cleaning it up,” Lance tells him, hands still moving. Keith sees the front porch of a house with a swimming pool, a bustling city with a river and pastel, elongated buildings, a drowned city -  

“I’m not gonna throw up.”

“But if you do,” Lance sounds absent with concentration. “My room, my rules.” He’s biting his lip like he does when poring over his data-pad, eyes narrowing as he keeps searching. Keith sees the desert go past a second time. “Gimme a sec; the defaults on this aren’t great -”

“I’m not gonna - wait, wait, go back!” The desperate edge to Keith’s voice is accidental. Lance jerks to a stop on instinct, and turns with his mouth already open, but Keith doesn’t care, he’s staring at the room that settles into place around them like film settling on top of hot liquid.

It’s not a particularly special room by anyone’s standards. There’s green curtains, a regulation bed covered with an obscenely soft maroon blanket that isn’t. The window is open, and you can hear the faint sound of a drill sergeant outside. There’s a framed photo on the bookshelf, which is ordered reverse-alphabetically, because Keith put those books there on moving day, and Keith turned that photo around every time he visited because he’d had braces at thirteen and was embarrassed by it.

Shiro had always fixed it after Keith left, though.

“Why do you have my brother’s room saved,” Keith says in the silence. As far as he’s aware, Lance never knew Shiro personally before the desert. Lance wouldn’t have known which room was his. He takes his eyes away from the cork pin-board with a neatly pencilled-out timetable, multiple Post-it notes, and a photo of Shiro and Matt at their graduation and pins his gaze into Lance instead, who hunches a little.

“I just -” Lance stammers, “Why - why do you think? The same reason I have the desert?”

“ _What?_ ” Keith hisses. Something of what he’s feeling must bleed into his face, because Lance takes one proper look at his face and goes, “No, not like that! I just - look, I have for Hunk, too, see!” He scrambles and settles on the swimming pool again. “And - and this is Pidge’s!” The city with the river, which Keith realises must be Hamburg. “And then I have my - I have my old Garrison room somewhere -”

He’s rapidly flipping through the rooms, his own body flickering. Keith goes, “But, Lance. You _hated_ the Garrison.”

“I know!”

“Like, _really_ hated it. I saw you crying behind the training grounds once -”

He sees Lance’s shoulders tense and internally curses himself. He hadn’t meant to say it, but it had slipped out anyway. He wonders if Lance being contagious is why he can’t stop running his mouth off around him, but if Keith’s self-critical he knows it’s because the image had stayed with him for weeks, every time he passed an easily-grinning Lance in the rec room or the canteen. He’d not meant to linger - he’d been on his way back from Shiro’s, actually, because they tried to eat breakfast together once a week - he’d been passing, and heard a soft noise; turned to see a tall boy in cadet uniform sat on the grass, back to the chain-link fence, legs sprawled out and heedless of the dirt, never mind inspection was due in half an hour -

“I kind of wish you’d stop remembering me,” Lance says, voice low like something in him seems lowed every time they bring up the Garrison around him. And livid, like the way his eyes had flashed when he’d seen Keith watching him behind the training grounds, Keith’s own hands limp at his sides. Keith remembers Lance had his hand over his own mouth, and that’s why the sound had been soft: muffled, something kept close, kept in.

 

(“You’re crying,” Keith had said, stupidly but it was the _truth_ , and Lance had looked at him, had taken his hand away from his mouth to snarl, “Do I look like I want to fucking talk to you right now, Kogane? Fuck off,” and after that when Lance wasn’t actively sending him death glares and announcing how he was trying to beat him into the ground, he was avoiding Keith which -

 

That’s something Lance does, it seems. Deflecting.)

 

“But if you hate it so much, then why -” _Why go to all the meticulous detail of programming in an exact copy of your old room? Why have Shiro’s room? Why have any of this at all?_

“It’s not for me!” Lance bursts out, and then looks away, curling his hands around his knees. “It’s - it’s not for me.”

Keith doesn’t get it, until he does.

“Those helmets. The mind-sharing tech. Does this run off the same kind of -”

“Yeah,” Lance says, “It’s difficult to code in, but easy if you’re part of the system. And I am. Code, that is. The Castle made it all, I just fed it the right data.”

“Our memories. No, your perception of our memories. That’s why the desert is silent.”

“Hey, we can’t all be perfectionists,” Lance mutters. He sighs. “Look, Allura seemed to - she always seemed happier after visiting Alfor here, right? And I figured. This isn’t an easy transition. For you guys. I wanted to make you feel better about - about all of this.”

“For us?” Keith echoes, shocked. Lance - the one who’d nearly bled out on the floor of his Lion, the one who couldn’t touch or eat, Lance, who had no guarantee his body would accept him back in and even if it did, would be adjusting to prosthetics - which, although a life worth the work ten times over, was still a life with an adjustment period - _Lance_ shrugs and says, “Yeah. I figured it must be hard for you guys.”

“Hard,” Keith says. He’s aware he’s repeating, but he can’t help it. He’s reeling. “For us.”

“Well, yeah?” Lance sounds confused. “I don’t want you guys to feel -”

“Fuck that, Lance,” Keith spits, and Lance looks startled. “Just - fuck that. Honestly. Fuck our feelings.”  

That’s it, that’s what this feeling is: anger. He wants to know who told Lance he had to do this, and then he remembers: _no singular trigger._ Nobody told Keith that liking boys and being a fighter pilot wasn’t possible. Just because he hadn’t drawn out the Venn diagram himself, didn’t mean he found himself afraid of falling down the middle of it, just in case it turned into a rabbit hole, just in case it meant he kept falling and ended up on the other side of what he wanted. It didn’t stop him from hesitating on the Garrison enrollment forms when they asked - _to ensure compliance with the International Guidelines for Equality and Diversity (see: U.N. Conference on Equality and Diversity in Earth Outreach and Contact Programmes, 2046)_ \- for his sexual orientation. His hand had hovered over the _Prefer not to say_ option for a long time, though it felt like admission by omittance.

Because although nobody had told him it wasn’t possible, he’d still been surrounded by the same drip-feed his whole life: _it’d be better if you were normal._ It hadn’t stopped him when he realised - staring at himself in the mirror, unmistakably Korean in a small town - from thinking _couldn’t I have had this one thing? This one chance? This one thing I didn’t have to fight for?_ In Venn diagrams, there’s always an odd man out. Ticking the right option should’ve felt good. It hadn’t. It had only felt easier when he’d reread his testing scores, in the highest percentile, and reassured himself: as though making up for a lack.

“But -” Lance is saying, still saying, as though making up for that same lack, just transmuted into a subtly different element.

“Lance, look at me, alright?” Lance’s eyes lock onto his immediately. “Seriously: fuck our feelings. They don’t matter. You are not obligated to make any of us feel better about bad shit that’s happening to you. I can walk out of here and leave this, if I want.”

“I mean, you can’t, really,” Lance points out. “Unless you’re going for a trip out of the airlock and hoping the third time’s the charm?”

His shoulders are easing, so Keith pushes the advantage. For all his fear traversing other people’s emotions, for all he feels like he’s dancing on silk-thin ice when he tries, he knows he’s a good strategist. He knows how to follow someone else’s retreat.

“If you want to get angry, get angry,” Keith tells him, “If you want to cry, just - just cry, alright?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Lance tries to joke.

“Lance, please.”

“I don’t know what you want from me, okay?”

“I don’t want shit from you,” Keith says. It’s a partial lie, but in this case there’s enough truth riding on it that it carries. “This is your life. Don’t build your _actual life_ around making us comfortable.”

Lance ducks his head.

“Yeah,” he admits, “Hunk - he said that too, when I showed him.”  

“Of course he did,” Keith says, “Hunk takes more of your bullshit than any of us, but he’s still your best friend.”

Keith doesn’t have a best friend; he has a brother; he likes to imagine there’s some overlap in experience.

“Since we were six,” Lance says, with an immediate and deep fondness that sends something ugly ricocheting around Keith’s chest. Even his eyes soften. “Did he ever tell you that?”

“I guessed. Is the swimming pool his?”

“Kind of. His moms rent a place out in Varadero each year. That’s the rental house.” Lance glances up, as though remembering the room is still frozen on Hamburg. “It’s near my parents’ restaurant and - anyway, I’m gonna change this. What do you want to see?”

“Fuck what I want to see,” Keith snaps. Has Lance not been listening? “I want to see what you’re gonna be showing everyone else. I don’t want - ”

He stops before he says it. Pity’s the sort of word best spat, but once it’s out you can’t take it back. For a moment Lance looks at him, his mouth twisted, and he’s not there - he’s not there, Keith reminds himself firmly, but despite the faint flicker that runs through the hologram, his eyes don’t blink. His eyes are searing.

“You know,” Lance says, “I don’t think I’m the only one projecting here, my guy,” and before Keith can open his mouth on a retort, Lance makes the same absent gesture with his hand, and the entire room revolves around them.

Keith watches the river glitch out, only it’s more subtle than that, somehow more organic, and all the more unsettling for it. Now, instead of the silence of all the desert's unfolding sand and hope, he can hear seabirds, though it’s faint. He’s pretty sure Lance has raised the physical temperature of the room, but maybe it’s a trick of the light, which is rapidly yellowing, high noon rising like melted butter. Instead of the half-give of his sagging front porch, there’s grass, dead in patches; the guts of a motorbike sprawled out across the lawn, absently pecking chickens, an abandoned tricycle glinting like a traffic light, glinting as though to say: here and no further. He puts his hand on the grass, touch without touch, warm where the desert rang cold. He can hear the radio, and knows without having to be told it’s a love song. Lance is hung from an old tyre swing that’s too small for him; as Keith watches, he pushes off the tree with his bare foot, twisting the rope around and around, biting his lip in concentration. His other foot drags along the floor.  

“Where is this?” Keith asks, as though he can’t hear the laughter from inside, as though he doesn’t know, as though he can unknow because the knowledge is -

 _My father saved that last part of Altea for my benefit,_ Allura had said once. How long has Lance been coming here? How long has it been summer in Varadero?  

Lance grins at him.

“Home.” His eyes are wistful, and he ducks his head against his chest, glancing to his foot half-braced on the ground.  

“I kind of feel like I’m reading your diary,” Keith admits after a moment of awkward silence. Lance glances to him, raising his eyebrows.

“Don’t worry,” he replies lightly, “It’s the edited version.”

Inside the house, the radio skips and starts again from the beginning.

“Yeah,” Keith drawls, “you’re a real man of mystery.”

Lance pushes away from the tree. As the rope unspools and he swings around, a blur of khaki and blue-jeaned boy, Keith gets his game face on; by the time Lance slows to a stop, it’s almost there, but not quite. He drops onto his back and stares at the sky, which is -

“There’s two suns,” he says stupidly, and Lance shrugs and looks up.

“Yeah. Like I said, it’s the edited version. I programmed some glitches in.” Lance purses his lips, tapping his fingers against the tyre. “I didn’t think it was good to - to make it too real, you know?”

“I can’t believe your totem is a Star Wars reference,” Keith says drily, and Lance looks at him, delighted.

“I can’t believe Keith Kogane watched Inception.”

“Twice. Shiro took me to see it. Is this where you were, then? Is that - when we couldn’t find you?”

“When you thought I was a goner, you mean?” Lance winks, sees Keith flinch, and sobers up fast. “Yeah, I guess. I don’t really remember.”

“Bullshit,” Keith says, and Lance looks surprised, then grins with all of his teeth.

“You know,” he says, leaning so far back he’s looking at Keith upside down, hair brushing the grass. “Hunk said something similar. Not like that, but -”

“More words?”

“Nicer,” Lance says. “Definitely nicer. No surprise there, huh?” He glances up to the suns and scowls suddenly. “Can we, like - can we not talk about that?” His eyes are a kind of blue bordering on synthetic, which startles Keith, because they are. Lance looks so whole in this chamber it feels like Keith could reach out and Lance would run hot.

“Sure,” Keith says, and then, “You really like that song,” as the radio kickstarts back to life for a third round. It’s meant as a joke, but Lance - it’s like a whole body shiver, only static - and then he’s back, and shrugging, and he snaps his fingers and the song changes midway.

“Lance, no,” Keith tries, as the fourth remix of Listen To Your Heart he’s heard this week blasts out of the radio, invisible as the boundaries of this room, Lance’s body, the siblings Keith has never met but can still hear squabbling from an upstairs window - present and far away as all the things taking up space in Lance’s head. Lance, the tyre swing’s rope already twisted up in his hands, looks at Keith and laughs.

“You know,” he says, laughter still caught at the corners of his mouth, his jacket collar turned up. Keith wonders if Lance can change the programming when it comes to his clothes, whether he wants to, whether it’s just another way of tethering himself to the familiar. “You know, I used to be scared of heights?”

“You never said.”

“You never asked. So what’s it like then,” Lance asks, “Being inside my diary?”

“I thought it’d be more lockable. Maybe scented,” Keith quips, before looking around at the backyard. “I don’t know. Less...sensory?”

“You and me both, pal,” Lance says. He’s still looking at Keith when he lets go of the rope.

 

*

It’s not a fear of heights, Keith remembers later, at three in the morning in the training bay,  the Castle a steady, grounding hum beneath his feet. When people call it that. It’s not a fear of heights.

It’s a fear of falling.

 

*

Lance’s body is being held in a side-chamber off the main healing pods, rigged up to scans and monitors that blink in a cartography of purple lights and a language Keith doesn’t speak. Lance’s legs, now halfway to being rebuilt, reflect the colours in plated titanium, dulled by the first spiderwebbing of sinews, layering in a kind of taut synthetic replica. It’s not that Keith wouldn’t understand how the whole process works; he feels uncomfortable about knowing somehow, about how Lance will be the last to know his own body, anew and inside out. For the rest of the paladins, it’ll already be familiar territory, its capabilities common knowledge. He’s suspended, floating in a gridlock of technology, sparks trailing from the batwing of his collarbone as its new plating shines dully in the light.   

Lance hasn’t been to see it once.

“It’s like,” he struggles to figure out the words, following Keith around the kitchen whilst he fixes himself a bowl of Hunk’s current best substitute. Because of the holo-devices they’ve all started leaving strategically on various surfaces, Lance glitches between the signal of each as though walking along the kitchen countertop. “Like, in the prequels. When, you know, Anakin becomes Vader and Padme’s, like, dying, and they cut between them? One of them breathing and she’s just -  I can’t decide which one I am. Which one it’ll feel like I am if I see myself.”

“They weren’t very good prequels,” Shiro reminds Lance gently, from where he sits swiping through blueprints.

“I know,” Lance sighs dramatically, dropping down to sit, swinging his legs. Once or twice, the hologram doesn’t hold and they disappear when his heels knock against the cupboard; that, or they go straight through it. Keith tears his eyes away before he remembers Lance severed in the inwards buckle of Blue’s wreckage. It’ll flood him if he does, and it’s not helpful. “That’s the worst part. I know that!”

“It’s just your body,” Keith says, and when he looks up, Shiro’s looking at him in surprise. Pidge frowns and tips their head forward, slightly away from Lance.

“Wow,” Pidge says, “Yeah. No big deal. Just his body. Wow.”

“No, I mean -” Keith starts, then stops.

“Nah,” Lance says, holding out a hand, beckoning. “Keep going. I want to see you dig your way out of this one. Go on, wonder boy. Talk your way out of -”  

“It’s your body. It’s not _you._ ” Keith feels like the words are slow and sticky behind his teeth, sluggish with the struggle to articulate them. “It’s never been - that’s not you, Lance.”

Lance flickers out.

“Wow, heartless much?” Pidge says, vaulting over a chair to hit the reboot sequence into the nearest holo-device. Keith sets his jaw and doesn’t say anything. He tells himself Hunk would understand, if he was here, and ignores Shiro watching him very carefully, half his face caught in the glow of the forgotten blueprints.  

“That isn’t how I meant ---”

“Okay, and I’m back,” Lance interrupts Keith, appearing for a split-second at the holo-device next to Pidge and then jumping to the one next to Shiro, who jumps and says, “Jesus, Lance! I told you to quit that!”

Lance cackles, the sound easy. The sound quality fuzzes a little - the holo-device near Shiro is a significantly older model - but it holds.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Keith insists again.

“Yeah,” Lance cuts in, “You said. No, I --- get it. Kinda. It’s -- that’s not me, but this - this isn’t either. It’s just, like, I’ve seen the diagnostics, guys. This whole thing is enough of an out-of-body experience for me. Just don’t let Pidge touch my face, jack me up with some cooler shit, and I’m good. Maybe a flamethrower? Automail?”

His smile is thin, but that holds, too.

“You really need to get better references,” Pidge tells him, and it widens.   

“Classics never die,” he says, and disappears again - this time, it seems, deliberately.

 

*

Keith notices Lance spending more time around Hunk than he used to. Or maybe it’s that he’s spending the exact same amount of time he always had, and Keith is so distracted by watching his projection shift and ripple as he dances from holo-device to holo-device, peppering Hunk with endless commentary - maybe it’s that Keith is beginning to notice because he knows what it is to have Lance’s full attention too now, in the chamber that splits time between the desert and a backyard somewhere in Cuba. He watches Lance lean over Hunk’s shoulder, hooking his chin there and plastering his phantom weight against Hunk’s back, and wonders if Lance is being clingy out of a sense of needing to be grounded. There’s a weight to Hunk’s murmured replies and Lance’s immediate retorts, a call-and-response that’s being going on longer than any of the others have known them, something so ingrained in the two that it’s been carved into stone; or even more irrevocably, their DNA. Lance laughs; Keith’s stomach twists; Hunk’s eyes snap to Keith’s, but he says nothing.

“You know,” Hunk interrupts Keith in the middle of trying to read his way through a shitty Altean romance, “She doesn’t stay dead. You just gotta hold out another chapter and a half.”

Keith swipes the text closed and exits the data-pad.

“I’m working on my grammar,” he says hastily.

“Cool,” Hunk replies. “I read them because I like them.” He sits down next to Keith and looks at him expectantly.

“Do you,” Keith says, and then pauses, because do you want something is probably ruder than Hunk deserves, given he’s realistically the only thing standing between Keith and murder by palate. “Is there - can I -”

“You gotta stop with the jealousy thing, man,” Hunk says, which is not what Keith had expected. “Lance hasn’t picked up on it yet, ‘cause, you know, he’s Lance and I fucking love him but - he’s Lance. He’d believe the best of Zarkon if he could.”

“I don’t,” Keith says, swallows, starts again, “This isn’t middle school.”

“Sure,” Hunk replies, “Stakes are lot higher. Also, Lance hit his growth spurt after graduation.”

“What, really?”

“Yep. His family kept all the photos up, trust me. They’re like that. Also, my parents love their restaurant. We went to Varadero every summer until I was, like, fifteen. Lance didn’t come up to my shoulder until he was at least twelve.”

Hunk’s eyes are very direct. Keith, who honed his own bluntness to a knife edge and called it honesty, looks at the floor.

“You think because you feel bad about what happened, you just need to be there all the time, right?” Hunk says, very quietly. “I get that. Like, if you’re there and make yourself, I don’t know, you make yourself important to getting him back in his body 2.0, it’ll make up for not being there at the time. ‘Cause he needed us, and we fucked that one up royally.” Hunk takes a breath, unsteady. “Yeah. Trust me. I fucking get that. You know what, though? He doesn’t need us feeling sorry for him, and I’m not gonna make myself the cornerstone of him coping because I can’t - we can’t - be that for him.”

“What are we even trying to do, then,” Keith mutters, scuffing the ground with his boots.

“You’re gonna do what I can’t do, and I’ll do what you can’t, and, you know, there’s Pidge with half the Altean tech on the ship half-gutted. And, I don’t know, we can’t tell him how to feel better about this.” Hunk nudges his shoulder. “I don’t know about you, but I can’t handle that pressure.”

“You did not come up with that on your own,” Keith says, disbelieving, and Hunk laughs.

“Yeah.” Hunk bites at his lip, then shrugs. “Two years’ of counselling and thirty minutes of rehearsing at Coran, then another ten at Shiro. Take your pick. Coran couldn’t keep his voice down and I swear to god you mention Lance’s name nowadays and he’s there. It’s like You-Know-Who.”

Suddenly, Keith remembers sitting in the Garrison, listening to his tutor say, “We have excellent facilities for students who are --- dealing with situations. Anxiety, for example.” He remembers hearing Hunk and Lance talking quietly by one of the Castle doors one night, Lance saying, “You doing okay, big guy?” and Hunk rolling his eyes as he nodded. He remembers that Hunk finds process calming; trial and error, repeat, trial and error, repeat, that Hunk chose engineering where everything is explicable. Suddenly, when Keith looks at Hunk, something shifts into the right alignment.

“Sorry,” Keith mutters, “if I was being an asshole.”

“It’s okay,” Hunk says, “It’s not like you’re a conscious asshole. It’s definitely accidental. Honestly, I’m just saving myself literal hours of Lance complaining here, because he wouldn’t get it. At all. He’d get the jealousy part, sure - he is petty as all hell, but there’s no good way for you to explain it without explaining why and - yeah, I can see how much that idea’s appealing to you. I’m cutting you in to cut you a break, here.”  

His breath is speeding up as he rambles. Keith puts his hand on Hunk’s arm.

“Hunk,” he says, as clearly as he can manage, a little stilted with the awkwardness of saying it out loud, “I’m not angry at you or anything. Yeah? Thanks.”

“Oh, thank God,” Hunk says, hugging his free arm around his middle self-consciously. “I was really worried you were gonna be pissed. Big time pissed. Your laser eyes are something else, man.”

Keith opens his mouth to protest when there’s a displacement of static, a low whine of signal, and Lance appears on the nearest device, placed on the arm of the sofa.

“Whatcha doing,” he sing-songs into Hunk’s ear, who predictably jolts in shock.

“Lance, _can you not do that?_ ”

“Thought I heard you say my name.” He drops an exaggerated wink at Hunk; it’s not even at him, but Keith feels his face heat with second-hand embarrassment. “Don’t want you wearing it out, cupcake.”

“You-Know-Who,” Hunk mouths at Keith silently; it’s worth it for Lance’s look of pure confusion when Keith starts to laugh.

“What’d you do to him, Hunk,” Lance asks, tilting his head to watch. “This can’t be normal.”

“Nothing,” Hunk says.

“Nothing,” Keith echoes.

“Something,” Lance decides, “Definitely something. Whatever. Have your secrets! See if I care!” and proceeds to pester them both for details over the next half hour, but neither of them crack.

Keith doesn’t have many secrets, not ones like this, ones that have Lance all tied into knots. It’s a new feeling.

 

*

Their next mission is difficult. Not in terms of the intention. It’s a diplomacy mission, which are mostly handled similarly to Keith’s childhood: Shiro doing the talking and Keith keeping his mouth shut. It’s all going, if not according to plan, then as expected; in that the Urasian diplomats expect to find them subdued, their glittering eyes probing the empty space to Keith’s right-hand side and taking absence as confirmation. They’re dressed in ochre and orange, the colours of phoenixes, of ashes and burning bodies with the tang of gasoline: the Urasian colours of mourning. For a nation discreet by nature and history - with over three generations under Empire, each of the four diplomats, daughters of the old queens, are risking their lives by meeting with them - it’s a very deliberate message. The flare of the colours in the dim light set Keith’s eyes to prickling.

When they bow, foreheads to floor, formal as hands unfolding for a duel, Keith looks to his right on automatic, wanting to have Lance there; can picture how he’d stand, lanky and awkward, eyes tight with confusion and the weight of knowing you’re someone’s last hope. _Help me, Obi Wan Kenobi._ Keith bites his lip down on a strangled laugh.

“We were deeply grieved to hear of the Blue Paladin’s fate,” the foremost of the Urasians says, her voice harsh on the consonants. She trips minutely on that last word - fate - as though she had intended another word on beginning and then revised at the last second. Something about her face makes Keith wonder if she had been going to say _sacrifice_. She’d been wrong to change. That would have fitted better.

“Death is a process,” she adds, “We all are some way along it,” and that’s -

“He’s not dead,” Keith snaps on instinct. He can’t help it. Their eyes are honeyed with regret, and maybe someone else would find it soothing. To Keith, it’s just cloying, smothering, it’s closing up his throat. This feels like being at Shiro’s funeral all over again, staring ever-blinkered at the empty coffin like Shiro would sit up out of it like an old Hammer Horror so he could take Keith’s hand and walk him home from the picture house, avoiding all the cracks in the road like it was a game and no one was at stake if they got it wrong.  

They all swing to look at in him eerie sync, lips parted. Shiro’s frowning, but Keith’s always hit the ground running and never known when to slow down, Keith fucked up his driving test three times because he couldn’t brake properly -

“He’s not dead,” Keith insists, because Lance is so far away from past tense it’s laughable. Because Lance’s body lies under violet light, a colour that is one letter away from violent. Because if death is a process, Keith is sure they can reverse it, in stasis the opposite of forward trajectory.

“Keith,” Shiro says, eyes already darting back to the Urasian delegation, who watching Keith’s existential crisis with one part concern, one part fascination and many parts confusion.

“Uh,” Keith manages. Eloquent. “Um. I mean - I meant -”

He looks quickly to Pidge, beseeching. Pidge looks to Hunk. Hunk looks to Allura. Allura looks to Coran.

“Human grief cycles!” Coran blurts out. “Denial! Unfortunately. Yes. Unfortunately, that is a thing. The first stage, in fact. Of the grief cycle. For humans. The Red Paladin and the, uh, late Blue Paladin were close.”

“Very,” Pidge says, and Keith can hear the smirk. “Very close.”

Something complicated shivers over the faces of the diplomats, and the third of them inclines her head softly.

“We understand,” she murmurs, the hush of her voice like stone against stone. “We were not aware of the exact nature - denial is understandable, in the circumstances. Do you speak his name in your culture, after passing?”

They’re all looking at Keith for answer. Keith looks to Hunk this time. Hunk shrugs a fraction, and Keith turns back and goes, “We do where I come from?”

“We see,” the second diplomat says, which sure makes someone, because Keith feels like he’s been dropped into the middle of a fog and told to make it to the next checkpoint. Then again, that had been a Garrison exercise he'd aced so - possibly having been dropped on his head twice first. And then blindfolded.

“Losing a dedicated partner,” the fourth one chimes in, “We weren’t aware - our sources -”

“Wait, what?” Keith asks. Pidge is shaking to his left and further down, Hunk raises his eyebrows as though to say _what are you gonna do?_ “Wait, did you say -” but then Allura casts him a quelling look, mercifully escorting the diplomats out of Keith’s range.

“I missed something again, didn’t I?” he mutters, watching the roll of their retreating backs, ochre and orange and mourning.

“You sure did,” Pidge says, sounding gleeful. “Oh, boy. Dibs on telling Lance first.”

 

*

  
When Pidge does tell Lance, he glitches out for a full minute. Pidge, however, keeps laughing for at least another ten.


	3. Earth time: September to October

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Credit for this chapter's incredible accompanying art goes to [pfaerie](http://pfaerie.tumblr.com/). You can show the original post the attention it deserves [here](http://pfaerie.tumblr.com/post/158706158963/it-doesnt-feel-like-anything-when-lance-reaches)! 

 

 

Lance is at the other end of the corridor, paused so still Keith is about to go check he hasn’t frozen again when he moves, so fast it’s like he’s blinking in and out of existence - which, of course he is, jumping in and out of space mid-flight, faster than Lance ever managed before. And Lance had been fast; Keith remembers seeing him running circuits in the Garrison yard. Lance runs headlong at the sealed control room door like he’s barrelling off a cliff. It takes him a couple of tries before Keith realises what he’s trying to do: there’s about eight strides between the last device and the control room door, something Lance should be able to glitch through to the other side of, no problem. Only it’s not working. It takes six strides before Lance disappears and reappears back on the last device. He picks himself up a fourth time, breathing heavily - his chest heaving even if there’s no sound, muscle memory, visuals compensating - and jumps back to the first one. In the space between, he goes from standing, fists curled, to sitting, his arms hugging his knees to his chest. When Keith walks past silently, Lance peeks at him but doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t seem surprised. Keith wonders how long Lance could sense he was there, how long he let Keith watch him.  

“It’s out of alignment,” Keith says immediately, looking at the trajectory of the device’s signal.

“I know that,” Lance snaps. “The crystal in it’s been knocked sideways. It’s not a programming issue.”

The _if it was a programming issue, I’d have fixed it already_ goes unspoken. They look at each other for a long moment, the line of Lance’s jaw tensing, the tracery of bones underneath like a knife, until Lance turns away to look at the wall and he says something, so quietly Keith genuinely misses it, Lance’s mouth pressed against his arm and muffling his voice.

“I said,” Lance says, lifting his chin a little, still glaring at the wall, “Can you help me?”  

Keith nods, and ignores the way Lance’s shoulders relax. He rummages in his belt for a Swiss Army knife and sets to picking open the screws with the blade. When he looks up, Lance is looking at him, smiling widely.

“I can’t believe you actually keep shit in there,” Lance says, “No, let me guess: Boy Scout or Batman?”

“Shut up, Lance,” Keith says, and gets the panel open. He drops the knife to his side and gets out a pair of tweezers.

“Holy fuck,” he thinks he hears Lance say, sounding delighted. “Yeah, no, I’m calling it. Boy Scout. Be prepared. Be....really....super....prepared. What else have you got in there?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Keith murmurs. He’s distracted by pushing the crystal back into place without chipping it or setting it off against the other ones in there: he’s not sure that anything will happen if they knock together accidentally, but he’s not sure that nothing will happen either.

“How do you know what you’re doing?” Lance asks, as though reading Keith’s thoughts.

“I don’t,” Keith says shortly, and lets out a breath as the crystal slots back into alignment. There’s an immediate but brief violet flare, and when that settles down and Keith blinks the worst of the light out of his eyes, Lance is sat on the device, cross-legged and beaming at him and way too close. Keith drops the device, and it bounces on the floor as it rolls away, Lance scrambling to the opposite device.

“Good job not blowing up the ship,” Lance bitches, righting himself. “Again. With me on it. Also again.”

“Thank you, Keith,” Keith mimics Lance as best he can, clambering to his feet and ignoring the heat in his body. He wonders if Lance blushes now, or if he can reroute the programming to keep it down. “You’re the best, Keith. What would I do without you, Keith -”

“Yeah,” Lance says, uncharacteristically serious, something in his eyes trapping something in Keith’s throat. “Thanks, Keith. For not, you know -”

“Being an asshole?” Keith thinks of Hunk; Lance huffs out a laugh and looks down at his sneakers.

“I don’t think you’re an asshole.”

“You shouldn’t have to thank me for helping you walk through a door,” Keith says, uncomfortable. “We’re not - that’s not why I’m -”

“In a perfect world, there’s a lot of shit I wouldn’t have to do, pal. Thanks. Take it or leave it. But take it, else I’m taking back the compliment.”

“That was a compliment?”

“I was trying my best.”  

“Try better,” Keith says, and suddenly Lance is back on the device nearest to him, a little precarious but very, very present. He reaches out with his hand, a ripple running through him like fear or embarrassment, like how sometimes Keith had seen Lance’s hands shake in simulations.

It doesn’t feel like anything when Lance reaches out, hand on Keith’s face, his knuckles against Keith’s cheekbone; it doesn’t feel like anything, but that doesn’t mean Keith doesn’t feel something. On instinct, he reaches out for Lance’s wrist. Lance pulls away.

“Don’t bother,” Lance says softly, then, “You can’t touch me,” smiling a little helplessly.

“I don’t want to touch you unless you want me to,” Keith tells him. Lance closes his eyes and lets out a low, shuddering breath, the hiss of static underneath it.

“Yeah,” Lance says, “Keith, that’s really not the problem here.”

“Oh,” Keith stammers around it, the next breath catching in his lungs. Lance looks behind him to the door, as though checking for witnesses. It’s stupid of him. It’s the middle of the night. It’s as stupid as him leaning forward and kissing Keith’s cheek, a brush of electricity and nothing that sends the hairs on the back of Keith’s neck standing up, a lack of breath against his skin taking it out of his own chest. Lance skips backwards, hands folded behind his back.

“Haha, okay,” Lance says, “Bye then! See you in the morning!” and disappears through the door.

“Yeah,” Keith says, “Yeah, see you.” His voice feels so loud. He stays standing in the corridor, immobile for a full thirty seconds, his own hand pressed to his cheek, before remembering who and where he is and bolting back to the safehouse of his own room. He catches sight of his own reflection in one of the comms panels as he passes; his heart guttering like an open flame left out.

Wild-eyed without a desert, gasping without a fight; he’s not sure he recognises himself.

 

 

*

“Think about it.”

Pidge purses their lips for approximately half a second before shaking their head.

“Yeah. Nope. Nada. Not happening. Not possible.”

“But Pidge,” Lance wheedles; he tries to wrap an arm around their shoulders, but they sidestep him, body slicing through his arm in a burst of static. “Hey! Pidge, you’ve always been my favourite, even though, you know, boundaries.”

“That’s nice of you to say. You’re not mine.”

“Pidge,” he whines again. Lance shakes his fingers out, wincing dramatically. It’s not that he can feel it so much as he hates it when one of them accidentally interrupts the projection. “Look! You owe me now!”

“Sorry,” Pidge says, “I’m still not building you whatever it was you were asking for, mostly because I don’t know what it is you were even saying, but also because I’m ninety per cent sure it’s impossible -”

“But I told you!”

“Lance, I hate it break it to you but sometimes when you talk I’m not even pretending to listen.” Keith stifles a laugh, badly. “Lance, oh my god.”

Lance is following them around like a puppy now, glitching from countertop to table and back when they try and zigzag away from him. He screeches to a halt on his knees, hands clasped.

“I’m begging you, Pidge, it would be so cool - it would be, in fact, the _coolest_ \- please, please, _please_ -”

“You’re not cute enough, so cut it out. I’m immune to you.” This part is said with some relief, although they’re grinning. Keith is watching with half an eye when they slant a glance towards him. He’s only watching because Lance is so loud he takes up all the space in Keith’s head. It’s an unfortunate side effect whenever Lance is in the vicinity, the sound and the presence of him rising above the static -   

Their grin widens, sly, and they add, “Try asking Keith.”

In the split-second he has before Lance whirls on him, Keith narrows his eyes at Pidge, the bolt of embarrassment going through him like one of Lance’s terrible songs on the seventh playthrough. _Shot through the heart and you’re to blame._ Pidge sticks out their tongue at him.

“Hey, Keith,” Lance says, and suddenly he’s right there, crowding him, casually throwing himself next to Keith and his legs into Keith’s lap. They’re weightless, insubstantial, like Lance’s hand against his skin, Lance’s kiss against his cheekbone. Keith resists the urge to shove Lance off, knowing the push won’t connect. He keeps his hands on his datapad, anchoring them against anything stupid, and goes, “I’m siding with Pidge.”   

His skin prickles when Lance tilts his own head back to watch him, long and considering, the bated glow of synthetic blue. Keith rolls his own eyes, thumbs over the datapad to the next page, and doesn’t hold his breath.

“Ugh, you’re all the worst,” Lance throws himself back against the sofa. “All I want is extra firepower in my new legs -”

“Propulsion emitters aren’t firepower,” Pidge mutters.

“-  and I get offered the homegrown desert kid. When you have friends this fake, who needs -”

“I’m not the one who dialled up his own eye colour,” Keith retorts without thinking.

There’s a brief silence. Behind Lance, Pidge looks delighted. Shiro coughs once, loudly. Lance’s eyes flare with a sudden, even brighter hue before dropping down along with his jaw. Keith wouldn’t take the airlock again, but it might be less impossible than the ground swallowing him, Jonah-style, in one merciful heave.

“Blue is a natural colour!” Lance splutters. “So I took it from A40 to A50, that’s barely anything - who died and made you in charge of the colour wheel -”

“Just because you can find it in a backyard in Miami doesn’t mean it’s natural, Lance.”

“Excuse me,” Lance responds, a little snide, “I didn’t realise I was preferred _au naturel_ ,” and swings his legs out of Keith’s lap. “Whatever.”

There’s not even a displacement of heat or weight or - anything to signal the lack of presence - but Keith still misses it. Him. Nothing. There’s nothing to -

“You’re just pissed someone noticed, dude,” Hunk says to Lance, who flips him off before storming right into the glass wall, reappearing in the corridor outside, and then marching away in rapid, loping strides.

“I don’t think he’s the only one pissed over noticing,” Pidge says, not nearly quiet enough. Shiro coughs again. There’s a lull where Keith tries very hard to ignore them, his own body, and everything else. It’s nothing nothing nothing. He has to start at the top of the screen again. He’s lost his place. _I didn’t realise I was preferred au naturel._

“Aw, shit,” Pidge grouses, after a while. “You all noticed, right? He’s figured out he can walk through walls.”

 

*

When Keith opens his eyes in the dark to find Lance in his room, it takes him an embarrassingly long beat to register the faint light emanating from Lance, signalling that Keith isn’t dreaming.

“Lance,” Keith hisses, sitting up so fast he feels near whiplash. Ricochet. “Lance, what time is it?”

“Everything’s fine,” Lance says softly. “You weren’t sleeping. Your heartbeat was -”

“Okay,” Keith says, aware Lance didn’t answer the question but sensing somehow it’s the middle of the night. “I really, really want to ignore how creepy that just sounded but I really, really can’t. You listened to my heartbeat?”

“Not me,” Lance corrects him, “The Castle. It monitors all of us. It wants to keep us alive.”

“Right,” Keith grits out. “Great. Of course. I was trying to sleep, so if you could -”

“You have insomnia.”

“Yes! Which is why I said _trying_.”

“I started getting that. After we got here. Not before.” Lance sighs and starts to drift around the room like a restless cat. “There’s something about how it’s always dark out there. It feels like I could sleep for days and wake up and nothing would have changed. It’d still be dark out there. And quiet. Super quiet.” He shudders, then glances at Keith. “Do you get that?”  

“Quiet?” Keith says, “Not with you around really, no.”

Lance flips him off, the movement almost lazy, and throws himself onto the bed next to Keith. It’s so close to one of Keith’s dreams, Lance slung across Keith’s bed, that he folds his own arms around himself. It’s easier than sitting on his hands as he asks, “Where do you - do you sleep?”  

Lance casts him a deeply amused look. Keith sets his jaw and tells himself looking away now is risking opening himself up too much. He knows he must have tells.

“I didn’t want to assume,” he adds, heating when Lance’s smile widens silently. When it’s this late and Lance is looking at him, with eyes so warm they seem to tug at Keith’s blood below the skin - when it feels like they’re sealed out of time - sometimes when he can’t sleep, Keith lies on his back and thinks about Lance building him a whole desert -

“I go on standby,” Lance explains. “It’s not the same.”

“You know you missed out on a pun there,” Keith says, and it takes a second, but then the penny drops and Lance gasps softly. Keith rolls his eyes, but it feels like punctuation in a longer conversation, a semi-colon, rather than a full stop.

“I must have rehearsed the walk here about thirty times before August,” Lance says suddenly, and Keith draws his legs up, folds them, tells himself it’s not retreat if he half wants Lance to follow.

“When you couldn’t sleep?”

“Nah,” Lance replies. “Just generally.”  

Keith absorbs this quietly, like he absorbs every last blow and keeps on his feet, only this one fells him. He’s sincere when he says, “I would have let you in.”

“What, really?” Lance looks like he’s veering between delighted and frustrated. Keith can relate. When Keith nods, frustrated wins out; Lance pitches forward until his face is against Keith’s blankets, inches from Keith’s thigh, and he makes a whining noise against Keith’s duvet. Keith reaches out his hand as though to stroke Lance’s hair, then remembers; when he goes to pull away, he notices Lance has turned his face to the side, the glint of his eyes as he watches Keith hesitate. He smiles crookedly.

“Intention received, Houston,” Lance mumbles, “Loud and clear. Why is my life like this, why am I so bad at fucking _timing_ ,” and Keith snickers.

“If you could,” Lance says, a notch above a whisper but only barely, half into the duvet for all his voice isn’t muffled, “If you could -” He stops and swallows.

“If I could what?” Keith says, aching with a mixture of drowsiness after the day and proximity, no clue what Lance is getting at, and Lance stutters and goes, “Never mind - forget it. You should sleep.”

 _I don’t want to touch you unless you want me to,_ Keith remembers, then,  _Keith, that’s really not the problem here._ His hand lies outstretched on his own thigh, palm down, heat bleeding through the material.

“I wouldn’t know where to start,” he admits.

“I could help you with that,” Lance says, dry as dust, and Keith chokes in a breath over the sudden drop in his gut. “Did I make it weird?” Lance adds after a good thirty seconds of silence, Keith busy relearning how to breathe; it feels like that first greedy inhalation after they’d both made it back out of the airlock, Lance the one constant across both.

“No,” Keith says finally. Lance presses his face back into the duvet and makes another annoyed noise.

“That makes it even worse,” he complains.

“It kind of does,” Keith says, “But who knows? You’re - you’re a bad teacher. It might’ve not been that good,” and suddenly Lance is sat up, looking outraged.

“Says you! Any time anyone asked you about the simulations, you told them you’d read it in a book!”

“I had read it in a book,” Keith answers, smiling. Lance sighs loudly.  

“It’ll be good,” Lance says, crowding Keith in an absence of heat and victory grin, “It’ll be so good and then - then you’ll be sorry.”

If Lance was in his body, Keith would be able to feel his breath against his mouth right now.

“Uh huh,” Keith grins, his heart rabbit-fast even as he tilts his head to mock Lance some more. “Yeah, you’re making it sound like an ordeal. What do you want me to say? No, Lance, please don’t touch me at all ever -”

“Are you mimicking yourself?” Lance demands, dropping back down to his elbows. Keith shifts a little further to the wall to make room, deciding not to answer the obvious. “Your heartbeat’s going really fast,” he informs Keith after a moment, his smirk visible in the dark. “Wow, you must be really into me or something.”

“Or something,” Keith agrees, and Lance’s eyes widen. He looks like he’s been hit upside the head, but Lance had used the future tense just then. _It’ll be good._ Keith wills himself to breathe more evenly. They both lie on the bed and don’t look at each other for a good minute because it’s too embarrassing, probably, even in the middle of the night.

“I don’t have a main directive,” Lance blurts out of nowhere. Keith makes a confused noise. Lance looks directly at the ceiling as though afraid to look anywhere else, and says, “That first day. Allura asked me. Shiro blocked the directive.”

“I remember,” Keith says.

“You seem to do that a lot,” Lance retorts, before his mouth resettles into a line. “I don’t have a main directive, ‘cause that’s how I know I was made like this. That I didn’t start out in the Castle’s data.”

“Because you’re human,” Keith murmurs. Lance nods sharply. It must be easier to say in the dark. The dark is comforting. The light leaves nowhere to hide. Lance continues, “I have a lot of secondary directives. You know, forming Voltron. Varadero. Hunk. Pidge, Shiro, Allura, Coran. You.” He risks a look at Keith’s face, immediately snaps his gaze back to the ceiling and babbles, “Not that it makes them actually secondary, you know, it’s just that - you never have one driving thing, ever. That’s not - not how people work. Their programming is so complex. I mean, there is one thing, sorta, but the Castle’s OS doesn’t acknowledge it as a suitable main directive, so -”

“Why’s it not suitable?”

There’s a pause before Lance answers. He’s worrying his bottom lip.

“Too big,” he says. “Overwhelms the system, maybe? It’s too encompassing.”

“Lance?” Keith asks quietly. Lance shifts next to him.

“Yeah?” he says, his voice so faint as to make Keith fear he’s disappearing.

“Can I ask you?”

Lance closes his eyes. Something like pain or relief or both flashes across his expression. It looks how saying the worst ugly truths of yourself feels, Keith at Shiro’s door with nightmares at ten only to hear Shiro say, _You don’t have to keep being scared, Keith. Nobody’s coming to take you away. I won’t_ let _them take you_. It looks how being seen feels.

“Yeah,” Lance whispers. “Yeah, you can ask.”

Keith knows the security measure, because he doesn’t forget easily, and also because Pidge had made them all repeat it back to them multiple times in case. He knows Pidge’s access code is Kerberos because no one onboard would ever say that word in front of Shiro outside of an emergency.  He doesn’t say either. He’s not asking Lance as the Castle’s resident AI. He’s asking Lance McClain; cargo pilot, paladin of Voltron, Lance who is eighteen years old and has Keith’s heart in his fists without even trying, without even realising.

“Lance,” Keith says, “What’s your main directive?”

Next to him, Lance makes a soft sound.

“I want to live,” he replies, and then repeats himself, his voice stronger. “I want to live. That’s it. That’s all. That I want to live.” His eyes are still closed. “I think that - I think that’s the last thing I sent to Blue. I think that’s why.”

 _I kind of wish you’d stop remembering me,_ Lance said to Keith weeks ago. In Keith’s memory, it now sounds like _I kind of wish I’d stop remembering._

“That doesn’t have to be the only reason why,” Keith says.   

“Okay, then. It’s not the only reason why.” Lance takes a breath in, and then out. “I was - I think I was angry at her? Like, not at her, but - she couldn’t do anything, and I couldn’t do anything - and even though I know it’s not her fault, it also - sometimes I feel like it’s her fault, and - I don’t want to be angry at her. Not when she did this for me. Not when I’d clearly - I’d asked her to do something, and - be careful what you wish for, am I right?”

“Lance,” Keith cuts across him, “If you beat yourself up any more, it’s going to be nearly as bad as when you’re up against me in training.”

“Sometimes, I think it’s my own fault,” Lance confesses. “If I hadn’t dragged Hunk outside after Pidge, then maybe none of this would have happened.”

“And we’d probably all be dead when the Galra invaded Earth,” Keith counters, maybe a bit heartlessly, given Lance’s flinch. He opens his mouth, intending to try and soften the blow somehow, but he yawns instead. Lance’s eyes glow for a brief second.

“We have drills in three hours. You should sleep.”

Keith groans out loud at the thought. Lance goes to get up off the bed. Keith uselessly tries to grab at him; his hand cuts clean through Lance’s waist, and Lance turns to him wordlessly. Keith tries to sort through the garbled thoughts in his head, now sticky with tiredness, but what comes out is, “You can stay. If you want to. You could go on standby here. If you want to.”

“You’re asking me to sleep with you?” Lance says, smirking again, “Honestly, who needs Tinder to cut past the social niceties out here in space when I have you?” but settles back down again almost immediately.

“If I’m gone when you wake up,” he warns, “Don’t freak out. It’s a standby thing.”

“Whatever,” Keith tells him, “Can’t be weirder than you. Move up,” and closes his eyes.  

 

*

Keith wakes up to find Lance gone and that it’s five hours past the initial planned training slot. No one has tried to get hold of him yet. When he stumbles into the kitchen, still yanking on his jacket, knife held between his teeth, he discovers it’s because no one else had been awake to get hold of him either; or rather, someone had hacked into the mainframe of the Castle and paused the clocks for five hours, so the usual alarms hadn't gone off. Lance is immediately the main suspect, but when Allura tries to ask him about it, he very unconvincingly fakes an unintentional glitch and disappears. He's done the same thing before during boring strategy meetings. Without an origin strand, they naturally can't recall him. Keith tries not to smile. 

“I noticed Lance heading your way last night,” Pidge says quietly, whilst Shiro and Allura try and locate where Lance might have interrupted the coding, looking up from their own scroll-through of their data-pad. “Not that you’d know anything.”

“Snitches get stitches, Pidge Gunderson,” Keith mutters under his breath. Pidge shrugs.

“Going by Holt these days, but whatever. Hunk’ll owe me, like, twenty dollars if I’m right.”

“You don’t know when we’ll be back on Earth,” Keith points out. Pidge grins.

  
“Exactly,” they sound thrilled. “Just _think_ of the interest.”

 

*

“I like your main directive,” Keith tells Lance at some point in the night, his half-awake brain deciding it’s important Lance knows, and knows now. Lance, who was idling, blinks at him. “I’d have - if you’d - I would have -”

He casts around for the right words and comes up empty.

“It’s okay, Keith,” Lance murmurs, “I'm still here. Go back to sleep.”

 


	4. Earth time: October to November

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Be aware there's some highkey nasty ableism at one point in this chapter, debating the value of Lance's life in AI form. If you want to avoid it, go from "“I’m not dead,” Lance hisses" to "“You’re right, I can’t,” Lance says, his voice disturbingly level," and you're good. Given this is a pseudo-disability/chronic illness arc for Lance, I don't feel I can in good conscience not mention that. Also, general disclaimer that Lance and Keith are both 18 (it's been mentioned before, but just reiterating). There's one last chapter and then we're done - turns out I had more to write then I thought.

  
  
  


It takes Zarkon until October to catch them out. Allura has been racing them across the universe so fast the stars seem to meld into one another, cleaving into one body, into horizontal bars of light that make Lance put his hand against the glass - gently, as though in fear of passing through it entirely - and whisper  _ warp speed.  _

“He’s making a reference again, isn’t he,” Allura mutters, hands outstretched on the controls, skin dull with tiredness. 

“Don’t worry,” Pidge reassures her, “You’re really not missing out.”  

Lance looks up, but barely bothers to make the effort of a glare. They’re all wearing down, crystallising, the exhaustion of being perpetually buffeted turning their bones to beach glass. Last night, Keith looked up halfway through training to see Lance watching him with the sort of longing that makes Keith want to make all sorts of stupid deals; the week before, Lance didn’t turn up to sit with them whilst they ate at all. It’s only small things, but when your equilibrium is a house of cards, all it takes is one flinch from a papercut. That’s all it takes to take the ground out from under you. When the alarms start blaring, it’s almost a relief, to hear the axe falling at last. 

“Race you to the Lions,” Lance says, winking at Keith, the red lights of the alarms cutting through his body and illuminating like his eyes. Then he disappears. 

When Keith makes it, panting and out of breath, to Red, Lance is lying on Blue’s nose, both of their eyes alight, lying on his stomach and resting his chin in his hands. 

“Nice,” Lance comments, as Keith races past him to Red, “Valiant. A for Effort.” 

He thinks Lance might be checking him out as he passes. 

“At least I bothered to get dressed,” Keith calls back. Lance is wearing a black shirt with a white denim jacket that Keith has definitely seen on a fifteen-year-old Hunk in the mind-tech. The shirt looks suspiciously like his, but he’s - he doesn’t have time to ask, because Allura is calling out formations, Pidge a blur as they vault to their own Lion, and in the middle of all the chaos Lance salutes him, glitches out, and then there’s his voice down the comms link. 

“Not gonna lie,” Lance says, “I just think you’re jealous you can’t do Casual Friday too. Besides,” his voice slides against Keith through the comms link, helmet on and throwing himself into the pilot’s seat, “You can’t talk. You sleep in the same clothes you wear out and that’s just sad.” 

“I’m asking how Lance knows that later,” Pidge chirps up, which is when Keith realises Lance had been talking into the mains comms link. 

“I’m covering my ears when you ask,” Hunk offers. 

“Can we focus on the imminent attack from Zarkon’s forces,” Shiro cuts in. “I’d very much like to focus on that.” 

“Please,” Keith says, “Let’s,” and grits his teeth against Pidge and Lance laughing in unison like their own coven of two. They’re still laughing when they swing right into the path of the Galra ships. 

They stop laughing. 

“Well, shit,” Lance grouses. “That sure looks like Sendak all right. I thought he was dead too? Couldn’t send the little guys, could he. It’s kind of flattering, when you think about --”

“Lance, please.” 

Keith watches the approaching ships and his mind says:  _ What did you expect? History repeats itself.  _ The violet flares of their lights, looming up out of the weightless dark, make Keith think invariably of Lance’s face in stillness, eyes closed, pupils moving back and forth rapidly under the lids: dream without dream. 

There’s a beat, where everything is still and perfect and waiting like the desert. Keith can imagine them counting onboard the Galra fleet, imagining them settling on the wrong number when they see Blue there. Miscalculation. The message relayed back to the rear:  _ The Blue Paladin lives.  _ The ships open fire. Hunk swerves in front of Red, barrelling them both out of the way. 

“Wake up, princess!” Lance’s voice crackles on the intercom as he whoops. “There’s only room for one Sleeping Beauty on this team and sorry, I think you’ll find the position’s already --”

“Lance,  _ please. _ ” Shiro sounds like he’s biting back a laugh. “Can we approach this mission with some sense of -” 

“GUESS WHO’S BACK, BITCHES,” Lance shouts, delighted, a constant blur in the corner of Keith’s eyes like he’s a constant presence in the back of his head. He drops his voice back into a familiar cadence: his fake radio presenter voice. Keith internally sighs. “In honour of this heartfelt reunion, I’d like to dedicate this next song to Zarkon, Haggar, Sendak and, in fact, the whole Galra fleet -” 

“Less talking shit, less getting hit, pal,” Hunk snaps, repeating the same manoeuvre he’d pulled on Red to knock Blue out of the way of a tracking beam. Blue spirals through the air, Lance laughing wildly, three seconds before  _ The Boys Are Back In Town  _ starts blasting through their comms link. 

“This is awesome,” Lance hums happily, “This is totally gonna be our day, just you wait and see -” 

 

*

“Well, well, well,” Sendak murmurs, the timbre of his voice pitched to be as menacing as possible. “If it isn’t the Paladins of Voltron. Surprisingly intact. This must be my lucky day.” 

“Yeah,” Shiro says mildly. “How was space? I heard in it nobody can hear you scream.” 

“You would know,” Sendak snarls, and Shiro’s eyes flash opaque for a second, dulling. If Keith’s hands weren’t currently forced behind his head, held at gunpoint by a nervous Galra officer that keeps jostling their weapon into the back of Keith’s skull, like a migraine with a more permanent danger - if Keith could use his hands, he’d pinch Shiro. He settles for trying to do the equivalent with his glare instead. He doesn’t know where Shiro goes in his head when this happens, only that it can’t anywhere good, only that life or death is about timing.  _ Panic kills,  _ they taught at the Garrison. Life or death is your hand on the eject button, an inhalation, a letting go. Life or death is an anxiety attack in the bowels of the Castle and thinking no one will know. It takes Shiro a second to blink back, and in the meantime Keith tries to further assess the situation, a sinking feeling in his gut. Shiro, Pidge and Keith are knelt on the ground, execution-style. Lance had phased out of existence as they broke through the Galra ship’s protective barrier, gone like a migraine with a more permanent danger, and fuck, Keith hates repeating himself. Hunk, saved from the tracking beam’s lock on by sheer luck and, if Keith admits it to himself, actually keeping his eye on the attack instead of tracking Lance, had headed for the Castle at Shiro’s direct order. 

 

(“I’m not leaving you!”

 

“Not the time, buddy!”

 

“Hunk,” Shiro had said, sounding weary, sounding like the way the corners of his eyes tightened whenever Lance fell back into standing at attention, whenever they took his orders as sacrosanct, whenever the muscle memory of Takashi Shirogane, superior officer, overshadowed the man in front of them. “Don’t make me repeat myself. Go.” 

 

“Yes, sir.”)  

 

Keith’s seen war films. He knows how this ends. 

“Guess I would,” Shiro replies levelly, “Guess that makes us even.” A smirk tugs the corner of his lips up, wild and nasty and something deeply unfamiliar to Keith. A Champion’s smile. “What’s it like, being out there in the dark alone, watching the oxygen tick down?” Shiro tilts his head, birdlike, eyes gleaming. Keith suppresses a shiver. “Did you want to make it stop?” 

Sendak steps forward and cracks his hand over Shiro’s face. Keith sees the blur of Sendak’s hand, hears the faint wounded noise Shiro makes, the startled noise Pidge makes in echo as though they’ve been hit too. Keith takes in a breath and thinks, not for the first time:  _ I’m going to kill them all for what they made you do.  _

“You used to be better behaved,” Sendak muses, but his breath is faster now and his eyes are blaring with something: the look when you hit bone.  

“You shouldn’t let rabid dogs off their leashes,” Shiro spits. His lip is bleeding. His teeth are tinged with pink.  “They only ever go for your throats first.” 

“Do you even know how many you killed?” Sendak murmurs, crouching forward and grabbing Shiro’s chin. Shiro flinches back, but the Galra behind him pushes his head back forward by the muzzle of their gun. Shiro’s breath catches. If he wasn’t shoulder to shoulder with Keith, if Keith hadn’t known Shiro for a good third of his life, he might have missed it. “Would you like to know how many? Maybe you think if you save enough lives you can make it up to yourself, but what if it’s too many? What if you’ll never climb out of the tide of it?” Sendak blinks slowly. Something in Shiro, strung taut, shivers with being pulled too close to snapping. Hooked. “What if it’s just always going to be you and your dead?”

“Nice psychoanalysis. Do you do referrals? I’ve got a friend going through some shit. People keep thinking he’s dead.”

Lance, Keith thinks, relief and annoyance drowning him, Lance, you asshole. Sendak jumps to his feet. 

“No, no, don’t get up just for me,” Lance says, honest to God sauntering around past the guards and to the front. “Figured you were missing part of your little set here. Thought I’d help a Galra out.” 

He does the finger guns thing again. As in,  _ again.  _

“I really wish you’d stop doing that,” Keith says, and realises he’s said it out loud when Pidge snorts.

“Awww, babe,” Lance replies. “So, what’s the dealio, Space Koala?”

“Seize him,” Sendak orders. Lance lets the guards get close enough to reach out before he glitches out and reappears on the other side of the room. 

“Neat,” Lance says, glitching out and reappearing. “Fuck, the tech signal here is so much better. Murder perks, huh?” He glitches out again as they catch up. “Come on, it’s no fun if you don’t work for it. Oh, man, if they could see me now.” And again. “I’d never get picked last for gym!”  

“Maybe if you remembered you had a team, you wouldn’t have been picked last,” Keith mutters, scrambling to his feet. There’s a faint electromagnetic signal around their hands, glowing faintly blue and acting like handcuffs and cattle prod in one. Keith had found out the hard way that they gave an electric shock every time you struggled, and then sealed tighter. “I don’t know if you noticed but whilst you’re busy playing alien tag, we’re still sort of -”

“Tied up?” Lance glitches in front of him, assessing. “I don’t know, it’s a look.” 

Keith gives him a withering glare, then shoves his hands through Lance’s chest to slam the handcuffs over an approaching guard’s head, ignoring Lance’s annoyed squawk. In the ensuing shock, the guard drops to the floor, the overload on the handcuffs breaking the circuit. They fall away from his hands. 

“Keith! Not cool, man!” 

“Thanks,  _ babe _ ,” Keith smirks, rubbing at his own wrists. Lance, interestingly, stammers before whirling around and glitching out, leaving the next guard to Keith and his bayard. 

“Ugh, gross,” Pidge mutters, as Lance reappears on top of the Galra comms panels, cackling delightedly when their blasters wreck it and leave him unharmed. “Save it. I don’t want to die with you two as my last memory.” 

“I love a bit of self-sabotage,” Lance says, running along all the major panels, Galra shattering what they can to slow him down. There’s a horrific, high-pitched alarm as the panels report intra-communications meltdowns. “Good luck calling your bestie Zarkon now!”

“I think they broke up,” Shiro says, backing up until he’s side-to-side with Keith, “Zarkon didn’t exactly come rushing over to rescue him.” 

“Just like nobody’s coming to rescue you,” Sendak hisses, swiping at Lance, claws raking over nothing. Lance’s silhouette shivers with static, but reforms, and he glitches to another spot on the ruined comms panel. He blows Sendak a kiss. When Sendak charges, he doesn’t get out of the way, though his body blurs around the edges with static.  

“Uh, guys?” Lance says, frowning, another shiver of static. “Guys, I can’t move. Why’s that -” 

Keith sees Sendak’s other hand on the tracking beam before anyone else, the beam of light trapping Lance. The move, he thinks grimly, was textbook. Distract, deflect. Do the real work behind their back. He cuts down another guard, hears the faint sound of Pidge hacking into the doorframe to seal it against responders to the alarm, and tries to get to Lance, whose body keeps shivering, ever more unreal as he struggles and fails to get out of range of the tracking beam.

“Getting a dead man to do her work,” Sendak says, sounding satisfied. “Oh, but the Princess must be desperate.” 

“I’m not dead,” Lance hisses. Sendak laughs. 

_ He knows how to get into your head,  _ Shiro had warned them all, months ago, a lifetime ago.  _ He knows exactly what he needs to say to -  _

“Is that what they’re telling you?” he croons. “You and I both know there’s more to life than just breathing.” 

Keith sees the moment Lance stops fighting. His whole body slips into that unnerving stillness, but his eyes are wide open and wary, tracking Sendak as he moves around him, surveying the room from over Lance’s shoulder. 

“Lance! Don’t listen to him!” he shouts, hearing the desperation rasp against his throat on the way out. Lance blinks at him, face unresponsive. 

“Look around you,” Sendak says simply. “What is your species, if not carbon and oxygen? What are you without it? You and I both know synapses are electrical, of course, but - what about the rest of it? Are you enough without your body? Where is your body, Blue Paladin?” Sendak laughs. Another ripple of static rolls through Lance. He doesn’t reply. “No, don’t tell me,” Sendak continues, delighted. “They’re trying to fix it. They’re trying to tell you they can, aren’t they? But is that good enough? We heard of your death, in the heart of the Empire. Just because you salvage meat out of the dust doesn’t mean it’s still worth the while, but then again, humans are sentimental like that.” He leans in, as though whispering in Lance’s ear. “Table scraps, Blue Paladin. That’s all you are now. A silly, unreliable piecemeal boy. And they call you a Defender of the Universe?” 

“Lance,” Keith calls from behind the flash and swerve of his bayard. “Lance - it’s not - that’s not - Lance, he’s wrong! He’s wrong and you can’t -” 

Lance takes in a quick breath. Keith sees his chest move with it, sharp and sudden. He knows Lance doesn’t need to breathe. He knows it’s just a visual habit. It still cuts him open when Lance gasps inwardly again, as though trying to steady against an inevitable tide. It still cuts him open when Lance starts to cry. 

It’s not like the time at the Garrison. He’s so still. He keeps his hands by his sides. This time, it’s in the way his shoulders hunch, like something soft and wounded, something with its belly ripped open, trying to find somewhere quiet to die. This time, Keith knows it’ll stay with him just the same. 

“What use are you to them?” Sendak crows, pressing the advantage. “You can’t even touch me!” 

Keith is so thrown by Lance’s face he can’t look at anything else. He feels the confusion in his whole body when Lance, tears sliding down his face, looks straight up at him, and smiles, sudden and grim, a victory smile. 

“You’re right, I can’t,” Lance says, his voice disturbingly level. “But they can.” 

There’s a blur of yellow and yelling as Hunk runs out of the shadows, bayard held high, and Keith watches in a kind of distant surprise as Hunk brings the whole thing down on Sendak’s head. Sendak drops, his face a mask of surprise, like a stone in deep water. 

“Wow, buddy,” Hunk says, “Those crocodile tears have levelled up. I’m impressed but also, like, horrified? Too much power, man. Too much.” He sees Keith’s expression over Lance’s shoulder and abruptly looks guilty. “Hey Keith! Sorry about - it was Shiro’s idea!”

“Shiro’s idea?” Keith echoes, stunned, reeling, whilst Hunk reroutes the tracking beam. Lance immediately glitches as far away from that particular spot on the comms panel as possible. Lance looks at Keith’s face and immediately reappears as close to him as he can, whilst Shiro and Pidge head over to check Sendak’s vitals. Pidge gives them a curious look as they pass but blessedly keep their mouth shut. Lance reaches his hand out and traces the shape of Keith’s face midair. 

“Hey,” he says softly. “I’m sorry, yeah?”

“You were - faking?” Keith says, voice stilted. “You weren’t - you’re not actually - you’re okay? You weren’t. You don’t believe -” 

Lance’s face creases. 

“Keith,” Lance replies, “If I actually listened to half the shit people say about people like me I’d - I try and only listen to half of it, Keith. I don’t take all of it, and I don’t take it from goddamn  _ Sendak _ .” His mouth purses in disgust. “Shiro said if I could, I had to keep him following me. Make it easier for Hunk to track him, he could use my signal, since I’m visible on the Castle database.”

“Oh,” Keith says. Lance stays frowning. 

“I really am sorry,” he repeats, “I didn’t think you’d -” 

“Care?” Keith says, the sudden flash of anger-as-relief swallowing him. “Don’t be stupid, Lance. It’s not cute and it doesn’t suit you,” and brushes past him, his shoulder going through Lance’s, heading over to the others and Sendak. He’s collapsed just within the reach of the airlock. 

“Wow, yeah, sorry for trying to keep you alive!” Lance calls after him. 

Pidge toes awkwardly at Sendak. When he doesn’t move, they line up and get in at least two good kicks before Shiro pulls them back. 

“What?” Pidge says, “I’m working out my anger.”

“Can I take a turn?” Keith asks.

“Nobody is taking any turns at kicking someone whilst they’re down,” Shiro informs them firmly. 

“What are we actually going to do with him?” Hunk says. “I gotta ask.” 

“I mean, I think we know,” Lance says, “We gotta do what we gotta do.” When everyone looks at him, he shrugs defensively. “I can’t deal with him coming back another time.”

There’s a silence.

“Shiro,” Keith says quietly, “It’s your call.”

“Seconded,” Pidge agrees immediately, “He’s put you through the most shit out of all of us.” 

There’s another silence, even longer. 

“You’re right, Lance,” Shiro says. “He’ll just keep on. We can’t let him.” 

Keith can see the calculations in his brain with startling familiarity. Shiro had always been good at mental math, unravelling it in his head like a computer program. He can see him working at it now:  _ one life to save a thousand. One life to cancel a thousand out.  _

_ What if you’ll never climb out of the tide of it? What if it’ll just always be you and your dead? _

“Do you want the honours?” 

“No,” Shiro says, his mouth twisting, “I’m done being their Champion,” and walks towards his Lion without looking back.  

“I guess we could pick straws,” Hunk suggests uncomfortably. 

“I’ll do it,” Keith offers, kneeling down to wipe his bayard clean on the back of one of the guards.  _ This is for my brother,  _ an alternate Cain and Abel where they walked out of the desert together and turned their backs on God. 

“Keith,” Pidge tries, “Let’s discuss this.”

“I don’t want to. Hunk, do the Galra have any instant kill points?” Keith wants to avoid them, but he knows that isn’t what a Defender of the Universe does. His hands are trembling, but he’s sure he’s never felt more awake, everything around him hyperreal. Everything is in colour.  _ This is for my brother.  _

“You should stand back,” Keith says. “We need to do this before he comes back around. We don’t have time.” He raises his arms over his head, and then Pidge pushes him out of the way, hard. He trips over Sendak and lands on his hands and knees. His bones ring with the impact. He manages a, “Pidge, what the -” before he hears a familiar sound and freezes up. It’s familiar because he hears it in his sleep sometimes. 

Someone’s opened the airlock. Hunk, Pidge and Keith stumble back as fast as they can, gripping onto anything they can. 

“Time’s up already,” Lance says, stood in the airlock. The blast of escaping air goes through him, not around, but like the world outside, he’s unaffected by the sudden wind; airless. “Oops,” he adds, sarcastic, at which point Keith remembers Lance is only visible here because of a disruption of the Galra’s internal computer system. Including access codes. “Hey, if anyone wants to kick him for me, now’s a good time.”

“Think physics has that covered,” Hunk grits out, clinging white-knuckled to what’s left of the comms panel as slowly, inexorably, Sendak’s body is dragged towards the open door, like something being dragged into a wide and gaping mouth. 

“Hasta la later, Sendak,” Lance shouts, hands cupped around his mouth, “Adios, you piece of shit!” and then Sendak is gone and the door is powering closed again. It shuts with a gentle  _ snick.  _ Lance stays staring, eyes hard and unrepentant, for a moment, then turns to them, morphing into his usual posture. 

“What can I say?” he grins. “Guess I got the diagnostics wrong. Wrong door. We need to go out this way. Sorry about that!”

 

*

It’s during a party for the liberation of an outer moon, a week later. Lance still isn’t allowed out, for fear of his secret making its way across the galaxy and into the wrong hands; news of their altercation Sendak hasn’t spread; the space at Keith’s side is growing familiar but not less hollow. Lance hates missing parties, Keith thinks grimly. He must be bouncing off the Castle walls. 

Keith downs his drink - one for bravery - and is getting up to leave when he’s interrupted. His skin already burning, he yanks his arm away before recognising the alien beside him. 

“Hello, Red Paladin.”

“Nyma,” he says. “It’s been a while.”

“It has.” There’s an awkward silence, where Keith looks over her shoulder for the exit and she watches him without giving him the space to leave. “I wanted to tell you I was sorry.”

“What?” 

She inclines her head, eyes glittering in the low light. Her eyelashes are spoked with silver tips. Keith isn’t sure if that’s new, or if he never noticed. He hadn’t looked at her as closely as Lance had. 

“About Lance,” she says.  _ Oh,  _ Keith thinks absurdly,  _ she remembered his name.  _ There’s enough of a pause that she looks down at him, confused. “The last Blue Paladin,” she adds, slowly. “You were friends?”

“Yeah,” Keith clears his throat, something building in his chest. “Yeah, we were. I - I have to go. Excuse me?” 

“Of course.” She sounds confused. She still lets him go. Keith walks back to the ship, buoyed on the feeling.  _ I’m not his friend,  _ he thinks, and nearly laughs. 

 

*

Three days beforehand, Lance had been showing Keith how the rope swing worked, his hands hovering barely above Keith’s skin whilst Keith felt the grain of the rope in his own hands, the sun on his back that would never burn, the weight of Lance’s gaze. 

“What do I do now?” Keith had asked, and Lance had smiled at him, expression caught, eyes rapt, and said, “Oh, that’s the easiest part. You just have to let go.” 

“You remember who you’re talking to, right?” Keith deadpans, and Lance laughs, his teeth flashing. 

“Then don’t look what you’re doing. It won’t feel any different than anything you’ve ever done,” he suggests, and Keith lets go of the rope to flip him off, only that sets the whole swing in motion with Keith unbalanced. 

The ground comes up very fast to meet him; he strikes out a hand blindly, skids a little on the grass, closes his eyes instinctively. When he’s sure the world is still again, he opens them. Lance is underneath him, Keith’s arm cradled by his head. As Keith watches, Lance arches his back, shifts his outflung arms to above his own head, and crosses his wrists. Raises his eyebrows. Keith swallows. Not a fear of heights, but a fear of falling.  

“Well,” Lance smirks, “This is awkward,” at which point Keith realises his hand is straight through the hologram of Lance’s chest. He jerks up and away, pulling his hand back. Lance cackles.  

“Sorry, I -”

“Forget it. Worth it for your face.” Lance blows him a kiss. “You know my perfect weight is you on top of me, babe. All you ever have to do is - wait, what are you doing?”

“Leaving,” Keith informs him loftily, shrugging back into his jacket, hands at the zip. This feels easy. This feels like something that’s getting easier. His fingers still tremble on the tongue of the zip. 

“Hey! Don’t be embarrassed! I’d be into me too!”

“Leaving right now,” Keith informs him. “Nobody can hear me scream in space, so -” 

“Too late. Looks like your dignity made it out of the door without you.” 

Keith huffs out a breath when he drops down again at Lance’s side, jacket half-zipped. They watch the two suns for a while in silence. 

“So I was gonna -” they both start, look at each other, then look away. Even with the sun in his eyes, Keith can tell Lance is smiling.

“You can go first,” Keith allows. “Didn’t mean to put my hand through you.” 

“See, if I knew it was so easy to shut you up,” Lance counters, “If I’d known how easy it was to make you feel bad -” 

“Don’t gloat. It’s pity dibs.”

“Wow, fuck you.”

“Get your body back and we’ll see.” 

“I don’t think I need to,” Lance says, and Keith squints at him, even as his breath halts. Lance braves a quick look at Keith out of the corner of his eyes, and covers his face with his hands. “I just. I’ve - been thinking and - ugh. See! I’d rehearsed this! But you weren’t here and that’s -”

“See, if I’d known it was this easy to shut  _ you _ up -”

“Don’t. Do not.” The tips of Lance’s ears are turning red. 

“Go on,” Keith says, rolling onto his front, “Close your eyes if it helps,” and snickers when Lance gives him a savage look. 

“I just,” Lance stutters, flustered. “I had this idea. I mean, I thought about this idea and like, if you don’t wanna wait -”

“I don’t mind waiting,” Keith says immediately, but Lance shakes his head and says, “Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t know when - we don’t know when or if or anything about how getting me back will work, Keith. Maybe I can’t live in stasis like that, alright? Maybe I just want to work with what I’ve got, which is this and you, and -”

“Yeah, okay,” Keith says, and Lance stops, looking outraged.

“Hey, don’t just - say yes! You haven’t heard anything yet, and I had this whole speech and -”

“Cool,” Keith replies, smiling. “Keep going, if you want. Still yes.” 

“Ugh,” Lance groans, “Ugh, why are you like this,” and he does keep going. 

“It doesn’t sound like you’re getting that much out of it,” Keith says, when Lance is done struggling his way through the words. Lance’s expression is incredulous. 

“Doesn’t sound like -” Lance mutters, “Doesn’t  _ sound  _ like - what do you think I’d be getting out of it? I’m gonna talk, and you’re gonna have to listen. I’m getting so much out of it.” 

“That’s not what I mean,” Keith says, his voice soft and Lance frowns at him for a moment before sighing. 

“Keith,” Lance says, “I’m not doing this as a favour to you. I’m still - in my head here. So much of this stuff is in your head.” His gaze is uncomfortably direct. “Trust me. I’m getting as much out of it as you.” 

“Only if it’s equal,” Keith reiterates, stubbornly. Lance smiles at him. 

“Equal to you, wonder boy? High praise.”

“Shut up,” Keith says on automatic, and listens to the way Lance laughs, sweet and familiar. 

 

*

So Keith walks down the silent corridor. His boots are heavy, iron-toed, _ shitkicker boots, _ Shiro calls them: iron boots for a boy who wanted a tether, iron boots for a boy who was afraid of going out into the world unheard. With each step they send an answering shockwave through his body, trailing up his spine and syncopating to his heart, his last and greatest tell. He focuses on the rhythm of the walk there, falling into it easily, muscle memory mapping his way to the right door, waiting for the moment the routine falls away and all is left is the unfamiliar. When he stops in front of it, his whole body jolts with the motion. He never used to be so wound up in his own skin, tightly connected to every last bone and sinew. He never used to - he can feel every shift of his jacket against his bare arms - 

“Lance,” he says. He doesn’t knock. His heart is so loud he wonders if the Castle hears it. He wonders if they think he’s dying. “It’s me.” 

There’s a beat, a breath, a second to turn on the hinge of the feeling, the momentum: a moment to run for it, to cut out of this trajectory and escape intact. He doesn’t. There’s a faint noise, and the door opens.

 

*

Not a fear of heights, but a fear of falling. All Keith has to do is let go. 

 

*

When Keith walks in early to the team briefing a few days later, the first thing he sees is Pidge and Lance arguing, Lance’s hands on his hips. He catches the tailwind of it when Pidge pushes their glasses up and says, sounding bone-tired, “I’m sorry, Lance. I wish there was something I could do.”

“Me too,” he snarls. The overhead lights fritz briefly. 

“Lance,” Hunk says, a warning tone in his voice, “Don’t talk to Pidge like that. They’re just -”

“Trying their best?” Lance spits, “Welcome to the club.” 

“You should calm down before Shiro gets here,” Hunk advises, and Lance makes an ugly, derisive noise under his breath. With his face twisted like that, his body locked up with anger, he’s worlds away from them, looking ever more alien under the paling lights. 

“What’s going on?” Keith asks, and Lance whirls around, his face shuttering and translucent. He’s unrecognisable from the boy who had watched Keith the other night with liquid eyes and a mouth half-open like drowning. Lance has never looked more unfamiliar when he stares at Keith, long and silent, and then says, “Nothing.”

When he immediately disappears, Keith tells himself he should’ve expected it. Keith has never felt further away from him. 

“What was that about?” he manages, going to sit down on the sofa, avoiding Hunk’s soft and eloquent look. 

“Lance was asking about his body,” Pidge admits, sighing. “He’s never asked me before, you know? About a timeline.” 

“Oh,” Keith says. 

“Yeah,” Pidge echoes. “I had to tell him it’s - right now, I don’t know. It could be another month. It could be a year. It could be three weeks, or thirteen - I don’t know. And that’s assuming we figure out an reupload procedure. As it stands, we’re hanging on a prayer that Blue will come through somehow. Prayer’s a goddamn thread when he needs stitches. That’s why him not asking’s been - well, you saw how great it went down now he has.” 

“You told him all that?”

“I couldn’t not.” Pidge’s eyes were huge. “Keith. I couldn’t not.” 

“I know,” he replies, and bites his lip. 

“He’ll be back,” Hunk says, but he doesn’t sound convinced. “I’m sure of it. We should just - give him space, maybe?”

“Sure.”  

  
It takes them the rest of the day to go looking for him. 


	5. Earth time: November

“We need to get Shiro,” Pidge says, hands on hips. “It’s been two days, Keith.”

“No, we don’t!” Keith insists, hating how his voice tilts at the end. Pidge punctuates it with another sharp look. Keith looks away to the floor, and then to Hunk, who holds both hands up in surrender.

“You know him best!” Keith points out, and Hunk frowns.

“Sure, I know him. Do you guys have any idea how stubborn Lance is, because I grew up with his tantrums over, like, candy, and trust me -”

The lights flicker and the ground shudders under their feet.

“And trust me, this is much worse! Is what I was about to say! Justifiably worse! Extra super worst case scenario worse - Lance, _come on!_ ”

The ground slowly stills, and Pidge steadies themself, remembering to let go of Hunk’s arm. Both of them turn to look at Keith, eerily in sync, and when did they learn to do that? Has everyone been falling into formation - all these silent unspoken rhythms - behind his back?

“You need to quit acting like we don’t need help,” Pidge says, blinking and adjusting their crooked glasses, the look in their eyes too close to the mark for comfort when they say, “Shiro’s here this time.”   

“I know that!” Keith says, but his voice sounds weaker to his own ears. “Ugh, okay, fine! Fine, I’ll go get him! Happy now?”

“Thrilled,” Pidge grits out, eyes flashing. “Delighted. You might want to think about doing that right now.”

“Oh, man,” Hunk mutters as Keith starts down the corridor, “Lance is gonna be so pissed we went and told on him to Shiro.”

“What’s he gonna do, switch the lights off again?” Pidge retorts, acerbic.

Keith waits until he’s rounded the corner before he starts to run. He doesn’t remember much of it later, only that it’s when he raises his hands to bang on Shiro’s door that he realises they’ve been curled into fists the whole time. When Shiro doesn’t answer fast enough, he starts hitting the door with open palms, until the door releases and Shiro is stood there, his fast a mask of concern, going, “Jesus, what’s happening? Is the ship -”

“The ship’s fine,” Keith says, dropping his hands, the palms stinging. He gulps in a breath. “Lance is -” He has to take another breath, his lungs aching, but something in Shiro’s face shutters without him needing to finish.

“Yeah,” Shiro says, “I’m not really -” He raps his fingers against the doorframe in thought, an intimately familiar gesture, as familiar as Keith’s own reflection. Keith bites his lip and waits for Shiro to finish thinking. They’ve been here every crisis before, Keith hovering and waiting for Shiro to fix it, sick with conscience, something broken in his hands - a bird, a plate, pride -  until Shiro wasn’t there anymore. It had taken Keith three months to stop turning towards Shiro’s section of the Garrison barracks; another three months to quit torturing himself over it; and now Shiro’s back, it should feel like it never happened, the ground back beneath Keith - only, of course, that’s not how wound works. The scar tissue stays, silvering with age. The scar tissue keeps you standing.   

“I thought this would happen eventually,” Shiro finally mutters. “ _What are you gonna do_ , my ass. Where is he?”

“I wouldn’t have asked unless we needed you.”

“Yeah, I know.” Shiro sounds tired, but he matches Keith step for step.

There’s a theory that says children with siblings learn about other’s feelings fastest; even the youngest of children know their brothers have their own minds, their own inner worlds secret and unreachable. Keith wonders how long he’s been reaching after Shiro, even as he leads him back to where Pidge and Hunk are waiting. He wonders how long Shiro has been watching, waiting, knowing one day he’d find Keith had caught up. He wonders if Shiro watched him the way he did - fixing the bird, the plate, Keith’s wounded pride -  out of fear one day Keith would be there, surpassing his shadow, and Shiro would’ve missed the exact moment of the eclipse, the exact moment they were both at their brightest.

Pidge and Hunk are sat on the floor, but scramble to their feet when Shiro rounds the corner with Keith, hands in their pockets.

“We didn’t say anything to him,” Pidge says immediately, defensive, “He was fine the other day and now he’s just? Not fine?” Their face creases. “And he won’t open the door? We’ve tried, Shiro.”

“I could try and get my bayard again,” Keith offers; immediately, there’s an answering thrum of energy along the corridor, a pulse of it like the echo of a slamming door. The lights flash on and off erratically.

“You have to keep saying it out loud, don’t you,” Pidge snaps, before turning to Shiro. “He does that every single time Keith says that. Not that Keith’s stopped saying it.”

“Hey!”

“Tell him what happened when you tried to get it,” Pidge orders. Shiro raises his eyebrows and folds his arms.

“He sealed all the doors in the corridor for a bit,” Keith admits. Shiro continues to raise his eyebrows, only somehow it’s more so; it’s a minute fraction and Keith winces all the same.

“A bit?”

“A bit!”  

“Nearly half an hour,” Pidge corrects.

“Pidge!”

“Keith had to say he wasn’t going to go get it. Out loud. We figured that part out after ten minutes.”

The _it took Keith the rest of the time to actually do so_ goes unspoken.

“We don’t know what to do,” Pidge reiterates. Their voice cracks in the middle. Shiro scrubs his hand over his face then drops it to their shoulder and squeezes once.

“You’re doing fine, Pidge,” he says, and steps past them to the door.

“Lance,” Shiro says, then pauses. He taps his fingers against the doorframe again, glances behind him to where Hunk, Pidge and Keith are still standing. Squares his shoulders and looks back. “Lance, I’m gonna assume you can hear me unless you say otherwise, okay?”

Silence. The castle hums softly beneath them. Shiro drops his hand away from the doorframe, clearly encouraged, and goes on:

“It’s okay if you’re angry, alright? You’re allowed that. And we shouldn’t have tried to break into your space when you’re doing that, but you can’t just - what’s not okay is for you to disappear on us like that and then punish us for caring. We’re going to care, Lance, we’re your team.”

Shiro sighs. Keith wonders if Shiro notices he falls into talking in plural when he’s unsteady himself, shores up _we_ and _us_ to make it the gravity beneath him. If because it’s deliberate that makes it artificial: the gravity on the ship is never less real for being consciously arranged.

”And you know what - I bet that makes you feel like shit to hear. You can’t hide away until this goes away, Lance. If you could, I’d let you, but you can’t and we both know that.” A pause. Shiro rests his palm against the door, and uses his prosthetic. Deliberate, artificial; never less real for being consciously arranged. “You gonna open the door?” Another pause. “Just for a second?”

There’s a long, aching quiet. Then the door slides open a fraction. Shiro takes a step forward, but not before Lance has slammed it shut again. There’s a faint hiss as the door reseals only a second later.

“Are you kidding me,” Keith feels obliged to say.  “Are you actually fuc --”

“Keith,” Shiro warns. Keith shuts his mouth and watches Shiro’s settle into a tense line.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Hunk complains, and when Pidge and Keith turn to look at him in surprise: “What? Don’t look at me like that. You were all thinking it.”

“Usually, thinking is silent,” Shiro says. There’s something in his shoulders Keith hasn’t seen in a while: it takes a beat for him to recognise it as anger, because Shiro’s usually pretty good at shoving that back down, so much so these days Keith only sees it out of the corners of his eyes sometimes. Right now, though, with the exasperated line of his stance and his hand still half-curled against the door, Keith could look away from the tech and see Shiro at thirteen, seventeen, twenty: Shiro about to stop biting his tongue. Then, just as swiftly, Shiro relaxes.

“Nobody knows how you feel right now, right?” Shiro says, his voice so low and intent Keith feels like he ought to be missing it. “Nobody in the whole of the universe has ever felt like this. You’re carrying all this weight around with you, and everyone else is asking why you’re tired. Everyone wants to know why you don’t feel like yourself, and you don’t know how to even start.”

It takes Keith a moment to realise the insistent, buzzing hum around them has stopped, that the ground is solid ground and no longer shaking.

“You want to ask me how I know that?” Shiro continues. “Do you need to ask me how I know that? I think you know, Lance.” Shiro takes a deep breath. Keith hears it shake. “I think you know that already."

Then he steps back, as though to leave. He looks at Keith and shakes his head before Keith can say anything, demand he stay. This isn’t like a bird. This is something infinitely more fragile.

“If you get sick of being alone out there, you know where I am,” Shiro tells Lance, then gestures at them all to start walking away. Shiro only clears his fourth step before they hear the sound of the door unsealing.

“Go on ahead,” Shiro tells them quietly, “I’ll catch up.”

He doesn’t catch them up. They don’t see him until the next morning, when they walk into the strategy briefing and Lance is sat next to Shiro, spinning out blueprints from the projection of his hands and listening quietly. He’s drawn and doesn’t speak unless he’s called on, but he doesn’t glitch out of the meeting once or try and laugh his way out of it, and that’s - that’s something.

 

*

“Can I ask you something?”

Lance hums an assent. For some reason today, they’re not in Varadero. They’re in Lance and Hunk’s Garrison room. Keith’s not sure what to make of it, but given recent events, prying feels unwise. And it does feel like prying - like forcing his way in somewhere he shouldn’t to see something not meant for him. He taps his fingernails against the metal ladder of the bunk. Lance, lying on the floor and staring at the regulation ceiling, at the pearl-grey paint swirling like clouds, waits.

“Why were you -” Keith seals his mouth shut then, because he’s not sure how to say it. He’s got all the words, they’re just -

Lance sighs.

“If you can’t say it the nice way,” Lance mutters, “Just say it,” which isn’t exactly encouraging but Keith wasn’t expecting this to be easy.

“Was it something I did?” Keith blurts out, then chews on his lip, tasting salt. That isn’t what he meant to ask first. That isn’t what he -

“It’s not about you, Keith,” Lance replies, sounding tired. “Stop looking at me like I’m gonna set myself on fire. It’s not about you.”

“Okay,” Keith says quietly. He hooks his fingers around the ladder and holds on. It’s colder than it should be, he thinks. He wonders if it’s accidental, Lance transmuting the colours in his memory into temperature, making the grey of the paint and the navy of their neatly-folded beds inhospitable. “Is it about what we did?”   

“No,” Lance says shortly, and closes his eyes against Keith’s stare. Keith doesn’t break his gaze. _I like the way you look,_ Lance had told him, three nights ago, whilst a party raged on outside and there was nothing beyond the boundaries of Keith’s own skin and Lance’s voice. _I like the way you look at me._    

“Then why did you -”

“Why not?” Lance says, with a kind of savagery that bleeds through on the last syllables. “You’ve all been waiting for it, haven’t you?” He half-opens his eyes, venomous. “Don’t pretend you haven’t. You’ve all been waiting for it. _Lance is a drama queen, Lance is a crybaby, Lance is totally gonna lose his shit over waking up in the Matrix -_ ”

“If you think any of us think like that, then -”

“So yeah, consider this me losing my shit, Keith. This is what it looks like.”  Lance’s shoulders sag against the dark of the carpet. He lies parallel to his Garrison uniform hanging empty, a ghost over the cupboard door.

“I thought it was getting better,” Keith says into the quiet. “I thought it was getting - easier for you -”

Lance makes a frustrated noise and presses his palms over his eyes.

“It was! It has been! But, you know, that’s the thing. It doesn’t get easier, Keith. It just gets easier to know it. It doesn’t get easier, it gets familiar.” He looks sidelong at Keith, his eyes drifting to the bunk. “Ugh, I fucking hate this room.”

“You picked it.”

“Yeah, well,” Lance snipes, “I wanna pick something else.”

Keith waits for him to settle back on Varadero - Lance is predictable in what he finds soothing, in where he goes when he wants to ground himself - and says, “I’d like to see Cuba some day.”

Lance squints at him, the look in his eyes almost suspicious, before he leans across the grass, hand outstretched. It takes Keith a moment to catch on, but then he does. Very carefully, he leans over and places his hand over Lance’s, feeling sun-warmed grass beneath his fingertips.

“Good enough,” Lance says, his mouth quirking, then, “You should totally come visit. Help me convince my mom I do actually have friends.”

“She thinks you don’t have friends?”

“She worries.” Lance swallows and blinks. “Uh. Not that I want to be - I don’t want be your friend.”

“I was gonna ask if you did all of that with all your friends,” Keith teases, and Lance rolls his eyes.

“Yeah, no. Guess you’re special.”

“Okay,” Keith says, his stomach warming with it, “Guess I am.” He lies down next to Lance and closes his eyes.

“It’s not anything you’ve done,” Lance repeats in his ear, more urgently this time. “You’re good. We’re good.”

“Yeah,” Keith murmurs, letting happiness - newly-gilded, tempered like steel - run through him. “We are.”  

“It comes and goes,” Lance says after a while of listening to the radio, locked onto that same song again. “It’s not feeling better. Or getting better. That’s not - it’s like - some days are good, and some aren’t. And, you know, it’s not a horizontal line, or if it is, you’re going back and forth across it, and some days you’re not going anywhere at all.”  

“That’s shockingly informative, coming from you.”

“Hey!”

“Thank you,” Keith says honestly, and then before Lance can open his mouth and say something obnoxious, he changes the subject. “You always play the same song here. You know that, right?”

Next to him, Lance goes very still.

“Uh,” Lance mutters, turning his face away. “Yeah. You noticed, then.”

“It’s something weird, isn’t it,” Keith immediately decides, and Lance bolts up, outraged.

“It’s not weird!”

“It’s definitely weird.”

“You’re weird!”

“Feeling’s mutual.”

“So you agree you’re weird!” Lance says, triumphant. “I knew it, I knew there had to be some shred of self-awareness under all that -”

“Lance,” Keith says, and pins him with his stare. Lance bites his lip, caught out, and won’t meet his eyes. “What’s the song?”

“Okay, it’s a little weird,” Lance admits.

“Knew it,” Keith sounds smug as he feels. Lance shoots him a glare.

“It’s only the tiniest bit weird,” Lance sounds defensive. He’s pouting, his eyes huge. Keith’s chest aches even before he laughs. “It’s my - my mom’s favourite song, okay? She plays it to my Dad. It’s, I don’t know, it’s their thing. She requests it on the radio, you know? She texts it in so he can hear it at work.”

Keith stops laughing.

“Oh, jeez,” Lance mutters, “Now I’ve made it awkward.”

“That’s not awkward,” Keith tells him. “That’s cute.”

“Somehow, you make that sound worse.”

“It’s -” Keith knows he’s treading on delicate ground here, dust up and around his feet from the abyss below. “Is it - it’s a love song, right?”

Lance looks at him, long and slow, and then nods. The song skips a beat, and then starts again from the beginning.

“Don’t disappear on me right now,” Keith says immediately, something shining rising in his chest.

“I’m trying not to,” Lance retorts, his smile growing. The moment holds and holds, unbearable, until it breaks over their heads.

“I look like him,” Lance says, glancing over his shoulder. “You’ve seen them, right? In my head. Before August.” He frowns. “I don’t know how close it’ll be now, though. With the new legs.”

“I don’t think you look like anyone. I think you’re just, like, made in your own image, Lance. You’ll always look like you. I’ll always like how you look.”

“Nice optimism,” Lance muses, “Did Shiro buy it for you?” but he’s grinning, and the sun is warm against Keith’s skin, prickling without burning, like Lance’s eyes.

“I think -” Lance stands up, like he’s made the decision right then. Keith knows he hasn’t. Lance isn’t like that. Lance isn’t like Keith. That’s half the problem. There’s something slow and molecular moving under Lance’s skin, behind synthetic blue and synapses; there always has been, and if you get hooked on the birdlike tilt of his head, the flippant gestures, the laugh track unspooling from his mouth, you can forget to look at his eyes and remember ice forms slowly for all you imagine it’s overnight. "I've been thinking -" 

“That’s dangerous,” Keith quips dryly.

“Hey! Let me finish.”

“I let you get away with more than you think,” Keith admits, and Lance goes, “I think I want to see my body,” fast like a dirty confession, the syllables crooked and hushed  with speed.

There’s a silence, and Lance offers up a lopsided smile.

“Made in my own image, right?”

“Made in your own image,” Keith echoes. “Do you want me to wait outside for you? Do you want me to come with you?”

“Nah,” Lance says, “I don’t - I’ve got this.”

“Sure, tough guy.” Keith stands up, rises up to meet him. “Let me walk you,” he adds.

Lance grins and says, “Wow, yeah. Okay. My sister always told me to hold out for a gentleman.”

“Shut up,” Keith mutters. “I just -” _I just want to do this for you, let me do this for you, I don’t know what else to give you. This is all I have left._ Lance’s eyes soften.

“Sure. I’d like that.” He waits, holding the door open with synapses, with coding under his skin, the Castle’s system encapsulating him like love, with his own peculiar brand of magic, waiting for Keith to get his jacket.

“Never used to think it’d be me waiting for you to catch up,” Lance says, as though half to himself, when Keith joins him.

Keith doesn’t bother to answer back. He sees the nerves in the faint shiver of static. He’s not sure he’ll always see Lance for what he is, not ever, but these days he’s getting closer; like the sun rising and racing across the sand, Keith chasing the thready pulse beneath the bravado like trying to outrun his own shadow. He realises he’s being staring at Lance too long, too open, when the door times out and slides back shut with a soft thud. Lance makes a small noise, hand still outstretched towards the panel, and doesn’t look away from Keith. He seems caught. Keith gets the door for him. Lance licks his lips, glancing at the open metal of the corridor.

“You don’t have to do this.”

Lance snorts.

“Thanks for the reminder. Come on, tough guy.” He grins, his eyes darting across Keith’s face like memorising. “Walk me home.”  

The walk is almost silent, Keith’s footsteps loud in the wake of Lance’s silent drift. He thinks about Lance being loud so people hear him coming, so people can’t unsee him, and feels the weight of his own boots. A year ago, when they hadn’t been able to form anything, when they were falling apart at the seams, memories spilling out in reams of _Mama, Matt, familiarity; Shiro, the sunrise, belonging;_ Shiro had said _you know, I think you two are more similar than you’d like to admit,_ and laughed at the horror on both of their faces. The Castle hums like a sleeping heartbeat. _It wants to keep us alive,_ Lance had said. It’s only now Keith realises he meant _it loves us._

Lance makes it inside the healing chamber just fine. He hovers outside the antechamber so long Keith wonders if he’s frozen, but then Lance shakes his head, laughs under his breath a little meanly, and stares down at his hands.

“Have you seen it?”

“I’ve seen you,” Keith replies.

Lance smiles, taut and uncertain, automatic. His eyes are locked onto the door, the pupils flaring.

“Do you want me to the get the door?”

Lance swallows. Another ripple runs through him.

“Please,” he says, bites it out like he’s scared of what might fall out afterwards. The door opens, and Lance catches his breath. Keith doesn’t look into the room. He’s seen Lance before. He’s seen Lance every day for three months, and every day for a year before. He knows what Lance looks like. He watches the violet light hit Lance’s eyes, watches his pupils contract, and prays he won’t disappear.

He doesn’t.

“Keith,” he says, very quickly, the words soft and blurring, “Keith, I changed my mind. I need you to come in with me.”

A younger Keith, the Keith of a year ago, hung up on jealousy, hung up on how Lance could be homesick without complication; the knowledge rendering him annoyed, making his mouth full of barbed wire, unspooling every time he spoke, telling himself Lance just - just brought it out in him - Keith isn’t sure anymore what he might have done, only that the fear of getting it wrong would have gutted this before it began.

“I can do that,” is what he says now.  He waits for Lance to start walking first, and falls into step.

 

*

Later, what he’ll remember is this: Lance’s hand outstretched, tracing the outline of his own face, the tremor in his fingers easy to pass off as static interference. _Woah, I’m so still. I’m never this still. I look like a waxwork._

_Yeah, it’s a miracle._

_Awww, babe._ Lance’s eyes flashing through delighted terrified relieved, the glimmer of his prosthetics in dim light, the beeping of his heart, an even keel where Lance is anything but. _You say the sweetest things._

 

*

“Keith,” Lance says, “Go to sleep.”

Keith, midway through yawning for the fifth time, raises his eyes to where Lance is sat, placidly watching his body breathe without him.

“I don’t wanna -” Keith mumbles, “I don’t wanna leave you.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Lance promises. “I’ll see you first thing in the morning.” He pauses. "Made in your own image. Where's that even from?" 

"My second foster mother took us to Sunday school."

"No shit," Lance hums. "You never really talk about any of that."

"What's there to talk about?"

"I guess." Keith yawns again. "Babe, please. First thing in the morning, I swear. I'm just - I just want to stay here a little longer, yeah?"

 

Keith finds he trusts him. Keith goes.

 

*

The next day, Lance meets them for breakfast for the first time since October.  He’s walking for the first time in much longer. Keith is eating, half-dead to the world, when he sees Hunk’s face and whirls around to see Lance on the other side of the glass-panelled wall. It takes Keith an adrenaline-soaked beat to register the sweat on Lance’s face, the shallow rise-and-fall of his breath, the crutches in both arms, the unfinished right leg and the shine of the completed left.

_I’m not going anywhere. I’ll see you first thing in the morning._

“I’m going to fucking kill him,” Keith mutters, feeling something wild like joy in his chest, as Lance blows a kiss, takes a triumphant step forward, and probably walks straight into the glass wall - if the ensuing crash and the way he staggers backwards, looking deeply offended and nearly tipping over before he rights himself, is any indication.

“Hey, guys!” Lance says, waving madly, clearly unstable.  

It’s like the whole thing began: Pidge reacts the fastest of any of them. Since Keith can’t decide if he wants to burst into hysterical tears, hug Lance, or punch him in the stomach, Pidge does everyone a favour and tries to do all three at once; bounding through the doorway to the corridor, beginning to shout at Lance before they’ve even cleared the threshold.

“You asshole,” Pidge says, sobbing into the med-bay clothes, the dressing gown thin and grey and slipping off Lance’s shoulders, “Do you have any idea? Do you? You could’ve died, and then nobody would ever even have tried to beat my high score _ever again_.”

“Sorry, Holtzy,” Lance whispers, wrapping his arm around their shoulders, chin on top of their head, leaning heavily on his other crutch to compensate. “I’m sorry I scared you.”

When Keith looks at Shiro, he shrugs and mouths _delayed reaction._  

“You’ve put your own recovery back by who knows how long,” Pidge snaps, “You shouldn’t even be standing, the strain on your heart -”

“I love you too, Pidge.”

They definitely hit him that time. He flinches, shrieking about stitches and _you’re the real monster, Frankenstein,_ until he looks up, sees Hunk, and all the colour drains from his face.

“Oh, boy,” Lance says, “Buddy, pal. Hunk. Don’t cry on me. You know I hate it when you cry on me.”

“Suck it up,” Hunk says, audibly crying.

“No!” Lance shouts, sounding panicked, as Hunk jumps to his feet, knocking his chair over, heading towards him without picking it up, “No, no, no! You know why you’re not allowed to cry! Hunk! Don’t you -”

“Lance,” Hunk tells him, “You’re already crying.”

“Fuck you,” Lance sniffles, “It’s infectious, you know it is, best friend rules.”

“I’m gonna hug you now,” Hunk tells him, very seriously. “I’ll shout at you later, but right now I’m gonna hug you.”

“Fine,” Lance says, still sniffling, “Whatever. Get it over with. See if I care.”

“Rip your stitches and I rip your face,” Pidge threatens.

It’s into the midst of this chaos that Allura appears, Coran running in her shadow.

“What’s happening?” she calls, skidding on the hem of her dress as she slams into the room. “Is the Castle under attack? Shiro, why did you -”

It’s only then that Keith notices Shiro’s pressed one of the comms buttons in the wall. It’s flashing neon. _Report to Chamber 35B immediately._ Keith gives Shiro a look, and Shiro raises his eyebrows and grins. It’s a familiar grin. It’s _I won’t tell anyone if you won’t,_ it’s stealing extra ketchup packets from the restaurant behind Mom’s back and falling asleep to the faint light of Shiro’s desktop lamp, burning out as he studies through the night. It’s saying, _I don’t want a girlfriend, Shiro,_ and Shiro going _that’s okay, don’t get one,_ shifting into the next lane on the motorway smoothly, as though not avoiding the bombshell, but neglecting it see it as one.

It’s homecoming.

“Hey, Princess!” Lance waves frantically from his current tangle of Hunk-and-Pidge. “Look who got an upgrade!”

Allura moves so fast Keith barely feels a displacement of air before she’s in front of Lance. She leans forward and kisses his cheek so quickly Keith is almost sure he’s imagined it - until he sees the flush on Lance’s face, heat rising. He tells himself he’s not jealous a literal princess got in there first, not when he technically got there before she did anyway.

“Oh my god,” Lance squeaks, clapping a hand to his own face, wobbling, and hurriedly returning his grip to the crutch. “You really did miss me.”

“You weren’t gone,” Allura says, “Also, don’t say anything else. You’ll ruin the gesture.”

“Okay!” Lance says, “Okay! It’ll be our little se--”

“Lance, no,” Shiro and Keith find themselves saying at the same time.

Lance’s eyes snap to Keith’s then, like ricochet, like rebound, like the thing you should have been making sure to watch all along. Shiro elbows Keith, and Keith elbows him back without looking away.

“Sorry, Princess,” Lance says, his eyes locked over her shoulder, “Can I just get past for a second?”

“Don’t you move one muscle,” Pidge orders, before Lance can even take a step. “I don’t know what’s happened - I don’t want to know what you think has happened -” they add, and Lance closes his mouth. “But you’re staying put until I do.”

“But Pidge,” Lance whines, “Look at him! He’s _right there_!”

“I’ll come to you,” Keith says hurriedly, ignoring Shiro’s snicker and making his way around the table. He congratulates himself for stepping around the outflung chair in his path instead of knocking it out of the way, even though it slows him down.

“Are they negotiating,” Hunk stage-whispers, as Lance waits for Keith to reach him, “That’s so cute. That’s.....never gonna happen again, but still. Cute.”

“Hunk, shut up,” Lance laughs, his face turning half to the side and away from Keith, his face illuminated. “I’m having a moment and you’re ruining it -”

“Pidge,” Keith says curtly, “Three second warning,” and then kisses Lance, hands on either side of his face, the skin warm under his fingertips. He feels Lance rock back in surprise, breathe a low sound into Keith’s mouth and almost lose his balance; Keith wraps an arm around his waist, half to steady him, half to reel him back in.  

Under Keith’s hand, pressed against Lance’s bare stomach, he can feel the staples, knows how they form a Y across his breastbone and down to his navel, knows how Lance is made of titanium and carbon and two suns in a synthetic Cuba. He knows how scars fade, knows one day there’ll be a line of livid colour sketched over Lance’s new ribs, and thinks _I guess we’ve both got to stick around to see what it looks like._   

“So, this is pretty great,” Lance says, pulling away from a breath, because it’s Lance, because he won’t ever stop talking, “We’re doing this more, right?”

Lance’s blush is hot under his fingertips, spiking when Hunk wolf-whistles, when Pidge goes, “Can I open my eyes now, Keith?”, when Coran goes, “Are we supposed to give them space?”, when Shiro mutters, “What, through a wormhole again?”

Keith kisses Lance a second time to try and make the world go silent again.  

“Paladins, Coran, please,” Allura chides. “They’re reuniting.”

“Be nice if they could reunite without breaking Lance,” Pidge retorts. “That’d be really nice.”

“You taste like that stuff you get at the dentist,” Keith leans back to tells Lance, grimacing, fingers drifting to track Lance’s pulse.

“That’s not a no!” Lance says, and tries to kiss him again. Keith feels Lance jerk in his arms, feels the hiss of pain deflate against his teeth, and immediately feels a familiar stab of concern. Call it concern. Call it irritation. Call it what you want.

Lance looks down at him and grins, wincing.

“Don’t worry, babe. I’m not going anywhere. I think I just ripped out a stitch. Don’t tell on me to the monster.”

“Lance, I’m right here,” Pidge snaps. “Did you say a stitch? How many?”

Lance winces again.

“Don’t ask if you don’t want to know,” Lance says, “I think I should lie down? Maybe? Soon? As in, right now?”

His mouth is a hard and trembling line, his pulse rabbit-fast against Keith’s fingertips. Keith can’t imagine what it took to get down here from the antechamber, alone and newly-corporeal, trembling in your old skin with new legs, trailing sparks and wires from the unfinished limb after you. He still can’t believe this is real, but the clammy press of Lance’s skin, the feverish and feverishly happy glimmer of his eyes -

It doesn’t matter how this happened, Keith decides.

“Put your weight on me,” he says softly, under his breath, and Lance glances at him, surprised and hesitant. They hang in the balance for a moment, until Lance nods, relief visible on his face, and slings his arm around Keith’s shoulder.

“Can I pick you up?”

“Go on, then,” Lance says, and whoops, a little breathless, when Keith does. “Careful, shit, careful!”

He reaches one arm out and drapes it around Keith’s shoulder again, his hand gripping the back of Keith’s neck tight enough to bruise.

“You sure know how to pick them, Keith,” Shiro mutters, but when Keith turns away to look at Shiro, he’s laughing.

“Sure I do,” Keith replies. He smiles at Lance, who smiles back, as though on automatic, as though helpless. Hooked. “I know what I’m doing.”  

  
It’s only half a lie these days.


End file.
